This would also be useful for city tours, outdoor dance parties, and churches with hard-of-hearing parishoners.
Then you could package it with a "creation studio" to create your own version for tourguides, museums, etc. Resell some hardware also as per requirements. You've got yourself a nice little business that seems useful for the business and client.
Seriously though, I think it's an under-explored area. Several years ago[^] I thought it could be a fun way to do an ephemeral social networking type thing on the tube; then something a bit similar ('YikYak'?) became briefly popular (in the UK at least) but just using GPS or whatever for location, still with a central server.
I think there's plenty of interesting things you could do ephemerally, P2P over Bluetooth or mobile WLAN.
([^] edit: that's not some weird claim to fame, I mean it in the sense of I've long thought this should be good, but then, I've not bothered to do anything about it, and neither it seems has anybody else, so...)
It's the implicit derision, that eg Twitter is inherently worthless because I could glue a few libraries together to a database over a weekend, and have a simplistic system where users who are able to broadcast short messages to other users, that is so odious about the "build it in a weekend" mindset. It denigrates the very real, but largely invisible effort it takes to scale a system up to that level. For any of us who have been involved with scaling a system up, it's invalidating to have your work invalidated like that. A Twitter or Dropbox clone built in 48 hours isn't going to handle the scale of actual Dropbox, nor will it be as resilient as actual Twitter in the face of eg a whole AWS region going down.
Build something awesome this weekend! (or even just something useful; it doesn't even have to be software) Just don't shit on someone else's hard work, even (especially!) if you don't get it. That Dropbox, reduced to it's basics is "just" a filesync client, and isn't actually the most technology fascinating project when described at that level, is an reflection of the oversimplification of the problem at hand, and not the inherent worthiness of solving that problem. The social aspects of what a program can be used for goes wholly underestimated and misunderstood a lot of the time. No one could deny the effect on the world that Twitter has had (though we don't have to agree on if the net effect was positive or negative), but many people still don't see the value of a product that isn't a revolutionary new technical product, like terabit wifi, but that's a reflection on their lack of imagination on their part, and not a poor reflection on Twitter as a business idea.
Due to the pandemic they made an app where you can follow along and listen to different parts of the tour
It’s not very “smart” I.e. not location aware to start the next prompt but honestly much better than those clunky audio tour boxes
However, to my knowledge it does not support live synchronous audio.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bloomberg....
And latency will be constant and near-zero.
I suspect that's why a couple of the use cases you mentioned (city tours, dance parties) are usually addressed with FM radio and not apps.
Perhaps there's a way to do this with a modern bluetooth stack. But none of the offline messaging apps I've seen (Bridgefy, Meshenger) support group audio.
1. I sometimes participate in Zoom/Meet calls when walking around SF. Not often enough to have a representative sample, but I know I've had a non-zero number of 1-2 second drops.
2. Students are often on a budget, and may have data caps on their mobile plans. Running out of data towards the end of the month might be OK if you're mostly in your room or the library. But it might impede you from participating in a lecture if you're walking out of wifi range.
The fact that WiFi didn't originally ship with (and in many cases still does not support) simple P2P with nearby devices is just unbelievably stupid. Apple still insists on their own stupid standard instead of the actual standard too, at least on iOS devices. (I think Macs can be coaxed into the standard mode, but Macs are real computers.)
Distributing headsets is a lot more reliable
Many museums do this already for their self-guided audio tours, it's pretty old tech but it works super well.
An analog solution (e.g. "walkie talkie") would work well, though.
Random talkers certainly not.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27294649/i-want-ble-broa...
Flawless at home/office. Useless on site
Source: I drove all over a crowded metro in the early 2000s with one of those fm transmitters for playing audiobooks to my shitty car stereo. 3 station presets was enough for the whole area.
Certainly some drive-in theaters in North America worked like this. There would be signs telling you to tune your car radio to such-and-such frequency to hear the film audio. Here’s a picture of one: https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3186/2718300357_ec1b9f3f45_z.j...