Transpire CEO Luke Smorgon
Melbourne-based technology consultancy Transpire has wrapped up a $2.7 million project awarded by the Federal Government’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) involving the deployment of beacon technology in France.
It was revealed in October last year that Transpire, which is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Telstra partner, had won a deal to develop a bring-you-own-device (BYOD) visitor experience system for the $100 million Sir John Monash Centre in Villers-Bretonneux, France. The centre is set to open this ANZAC Day.
The digitised experience system developed and deployed by Transpire is designed to interact with visitors to immerse them in Australia’s history on the Western Front battlefields during the First World War.
The iOS and Android app developed by Transpire lets visitors at the centre navigate the 480-square-metre gallery at their own pace. As visitors move through the space, a bevy of 450 Bluetooth beacons and custom-made antennae provide location information, prompting a host of 105 multimedia servers to launch video content at one of 450 screens.
Transpire’s technology solution is specifically designed to isolate, amplify and direct the signal of the beacons to smartphones, and shape the radio frequency and decrease signal leakage in a bid to avoid signal congestion throughout the museum.
In the back end, elements of Transpire’s solution are hosted both on AWS and on-premises, with the cloud hosting aimed at helping to quickly move large content, such as huge video and audio files.
Although the deal was revealed late last year, the project took 18 months and a team of 12 Transpire consultants to complete.
In fact, seven of Transpire’s staff temporarily relocated to France to oversee the system’s deployment and configuration, collaborating with builders, architects and content developers from France, Greece, the UK and Australia, among other countries.
For Transpire CEO Luke Smorgon, not only does the project represent a great win for his company, it also stands of an example of government collaborating with smaller, nimbler technology players.
“It’s great to see the government move away from large consultancy contracts to work with smaller but innovative businesses like Transpire,” Smorgan said.
“We’re thrilled to see the bleeding edge technology we imagined evolve from prototype to a fully functioning solution on the other side of the globe," he said.
