What is BLE? Portal lights an application of it

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a low-power wireless communication technology that enables smart devices to communicate over a short distance. Many devices that you use in daily life as a smartphone, smartwatch, fitness tracker, wireless headphones, and computer are using BLE intending to create a seamless user experience.
According to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) that focuses on low energy, BLE is actually a new Bluetooth standard. Through BLE, it is now possible to add a low-power communications interface to existing solutions. It helps to create novel less powerful devices such as a small coin cell battery based beacons that might be working for longer.

BLE has a wide spectrum of applications and is being used in a broad set of fields such as health, fitness, home entertainment, home automation, smart industry, security, and IoT (Internet of Things). It also found its uses in smartphones and laptops in our everyday life.

Portal light

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A portal light is a rectangular area light that helps you in indoor Global Illumination. Acting as a virtual window, portal light directs lighting into a room from the environment outside. Portal lights efficiently provide you a lot of ‘brute force’ Global Illumination for nothing in return. In case, you planned to get a transparent window, it would require up to 4 times the amount of ‘brute force’ Global Illumination rays to attain the same noise-free lighting, which obviously would considerably impact the performance.

Working Principal

Portal lights block and absorb Global Illumination rays. It works by sampling light color via the environment map shader, using one of the default scene environment map shader or the ‘Environment Shader’ parameter.
One can easily turn the lights on or off. It is also possible to specify a multiplier for the intensity of the light cast by the portal.

Tint Color

Through this option, it specifies a color with which to tint the environmental samples. Tint Color sees its effects on the color of the light cast from the portal, not the color of the portal itself when seen either directly by the camera or indirectly through reflections or refractions.

Portal Transparency

Portal transparency specifies a color with which to tint the portal when seen directly through the camera or indirectly through reflections or refractions. A color of 0,0,0 will make the portal completely black, while color of 1,1,1 will make the portal completely transparent. However, a variation or recombinant of 0,0,0 and 1,1,1 will be producing a partial transparent and a tinted portal.

Samples

These mention the number of ray samples to use for the portal light. For smoother lighting and shadows, more samples will be used.

Normally, with a larger portal or the more intense environment, more samples are needed to produce noise-free results. This is because of the more intense light cast by the portal.

Uses

• It provides location services for you.
• You can manage all BLE devices in real-time, and monitor their location.
• It can be deployed simply.