Bluetooth 5.1 officially announced: new location search function, centimeter-level positioning

According to foreign media reports on January 29, the Bluetooth Technology Alliance (SIG) announced today that Bluetooth 5.1 has been officially released and is now open to developers. A new location search function has been added, which can achieve centimeter-level positioning.

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According to reports, today's positioning services no longer rely solely on simple GPS. Smartphones use technologies such as Wi-Fi to help improve the accuracy of positioning services. Now, the newly launched Bluetooth 5.1 specification allows Bluetooth to also become a way to detect device location.

The main feature of the specification announced today by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is positioning. According to the introduction, Bluetooth can already be used to help determine your location, just like Wi-Fi, but now it can achieve positioning more accurately. In other words, with Bluetooth version 5.1, it is possible to detect not only the distance of a specific object, but also the direction it is in.

The new technology has many uses, such as tracking items that may be lost or have been lost, guiding visitors to specific parts of a museum, etc. The Bluetooth SIG said that the technology can provide centimeter-level accuracy for positioning services, which will make it a good solution for indoor navigation.

The Bluetooth 5.1 specification also adds some other features, such as improvements to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) cache, which can enable faster and more energy-efficient connections between servers and clients.

The new specification is available to developers starting today.