RFID tracking and positioning project

I was planning to do that, print out my powerpoint slide and jolt down a little bit of information on the side of each slide so I know what I will be talking about and incase I forget some figures like frequency or prices. As much as I would like to try to engage the people, the presentation only last for 15 min and I have enough of a tough time trying to fit everything in already. I will ofcourse hand out sample of passive RFID tag that I have so I guess that's sort of engaging them. Hmm it sure feel like that it would be easier to design my own custom radio gear then to do this presentation, too bad I am not a electrical engineering student.

It looks to me like your best bet would be to contact those guys to find out which types of tags they were using and what kinds of readers. I would imagine there are probably a grid of reader antennas behind that board and either they all connect to a single reader with some kind of multiplexing device that would allow timesharing and identification of grid locations based on what tags were read on which antenna, or there are simply several reader ICs connected to each antenna coil and the data itself is timeshared or multiplexed.

I bought some half-inch (1cm) antenna coils and a couple VERY tiny reader ICs from EM Microelectronics that could be used to build this kind of array.

If you need to uniquely identifiy items on the grid and link those IDs to locations, then you have your work cut out for you. If you just need to identify locations on the grid, then there are far easier ways to do it that don't involve RFID.

I've not heard of anything like that being done privately, but it's not impossible... it would just be expensive. Is there a reason why you need to manipulate physical objects instead of virtual ones?

If you want to physically manipulate objects, you might want to check into physically manipulating virtual objects using a technology like Microsoft's PlayAnywhere interactive video system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRfWhUnYyY8

Kids can even play virtual soccer using the system: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/superlocal/143070685/

Because the system can recognize objects as well as manipulate virtual ones, you could print special barcodes or uniquely identifiable patterns on your PostIt notes and keep using them on your grid if you wanted, with the system tracking when and where items where moved as well as kick off triggered events like an alert email when a schedule item is moved, etc.

A PDF about the system can be found here:

http://www.rfidtoys.net/downloads/Wilson%20PlayAnywhere%20UI ST%202005.pdf

As far as I can tell, this talented man is the brains behind the project:

Andy Wilson: http://research.microsoft.com/~awilson/



Edited by amal - 11 January 2007 at 2:49pm

I've actually played the virtual soccor game myself at a local mall, so I think if a mall can get their hands on it, it's got to be available through someone somewhere.

From the video, it looks like the system should be able to recognize patterns similar to the Semacode barcodes (and other similar technologies)... printing those up shouldn't be too difficult... but honestly, I don't think you'd need any physical objects anyway if you could just "grab" a virtual object with your actual hand and move it to a new grid space. The only difference would be that the objects would be projected onto the grid and not actual physical objects. The method of viewing and manipulating them would remain the same.

Since you're talking about 3 huge wall surfaces, I can only imagine the grid squares are quite small... otherwise you'd probably have just compessed the squares to fit everything into a single wall ;) The other advantage to moving to virtual objects would be maximization of physical space... now you've no longer got tons of physical objects competing for limited gridspace. You could also incorporate voice commands so the user could actually say things like "show me Dan's schedule" and the system could blink or highlight those grid spaces that contained a schedule item for Dan.

Of course, this would require a lot of development, but probably no more than a giant 3 wall RFID deployment would require ;)

No problem :)

I know this forum is about RFID, but I'm not a techblind RFID advocate. Its important to know how RFID can be used to solve a problem, but its just as important to know when RFID is not the best choice.

One example I constantly hear is people wanting to use RFID tags, paticularly implanted RFID tags, to do simple things like switch on and off lights. There is absolutely no point to that because a cheap and simple lightswitch + your finger are going to work better than any pointless and expensive RFID-enabled lightswitch and an RFID tag. What would be the point, unless you wanted to be called to every room to turn on the lights because nobody can use their finger anymore.