Last June, when Mozilla met in London, we took advantage of having so many Mozillians concentrated in one place to distribute early builds of the Project Magnet mobile apps, as well as a beacon broadcaster for laptops. This allowed participants to see and engage beacons from their fellow participants, as well as a few hardware beacons managed by our team.

We were pleased with the tsunami of data and feedback received, but were left concerned with the amount of people that didn’t get to participate, because installing the test builds was so difficult: Test Flight process for iOS and side-loading an APK for Android.

So, we prioritized streamlining user onboarding for our next experiment, to ensure that we could properly test out our hypothesis in another, controlled Mozilla event: the upcoming View Source conference in Berlin, Germany.

“Given an easy app installation process, event attendees will engage with schedule and venue-related beacons, resulting in an improved conference experience.”

We’re inviting attendees of View Source Berlin, via the event’s registration list, the opportunity to explore the event via the Physical Web, thanks to app store availability of Project Magnet for Android and iOS (yes, we made it into the Apple app store!).

We’re telling participants to “think of it as Pokémon Go, but with a real world mission!”

What does this really mean? When you install the Project Magnet mobile app, you’ll be able to get real-time information about the booths, venues and schedule, supplied by strategically placed beacons throughout the event.

If you’re attending View Source (or would like to attend, as there is still some availability), you can come prepared by installing the app, and swing by our booth if you have any feedback or questions.

We hope you’ll join us for this fun experiment, and you can look forward to us sharing the results of our test in the days following. Meanwhile, if you want any other details about our project, you can check out the Project Magnet wiki.