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A newer web-based technology has been given a green light from Google for some serious testing and we’ve been made aware via a post on Google+ from +François Beaufort. This new tech is known as Web Bluetooth, and as of today, it can be enabled for testing via a Chrome Flag. This is clearly still in testing mode and is available to those running Chrome OS or Chrome for Android M, Linux, and Mac. At this point, the availability is only of real interest to developers. The tech brings some interesting new possibilities to web-based applications, however.
From the Google Developers Blog:
What if I told you websites could communicate with nearby Bluetooth devices in a secure and privacy-preserving way? This way, heart rate monitors, singing lightbulbs, turtles and flying grumpy cats could interact directly with a website.
Until now, the ability to interact with bluetooth devices has been possible only for native apps. The Web Bluetooth API aims to change this and brings it to web browsers as well. Alongside efforts like Physical Web, people can walk up to and interact with devices straight from the web.
While this is clearly aimed at wearables and mobile devices, the possibilities could be very interesting. For starters, as we know with the coming Play Store inclusion, Chromebooks are getting ready to become a much, much different device segment. We are likely to see convertibles and tablets, GPS, LTE, and all the things that would create fully mobile Chrome OS devices. The addition of Web Bluetooth would give Chrome OS devices the ability to interact with all the things a phone would in the future. That’s pretty exciting. You can read more about the specifics (again, this stuff is for developers mainly) here.
Yet, I can’t help but feel that there are greater aspirations Google has with this tech, but to be honest, I can’t get my head fully around what all the possibilities could be.
So this is where we leave it to our highly-intelligent readers: what new things could our devices do with this new tech? What things could you imagine?
We’re eager to hear!
