Why RFIG Blows Plain Old RFID Out of the Water

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

There’s a reason why scholars don’t make the best journalists. It’s hard to cozy up to a title like Interacting with a Self-describing World via Photosensing Wireless Tags and Projectors which is the title that hides an actually very exciting new development in RFID tracking.

So let me see if I can break this down into something more manageable.

Researchers at Mitsubishi got fed up with what they call, “unpowered passive-RFID - a technology that promises to have significant impact in real-world applications.” They decided they could take plain old RFID and add a spin - adding a visual way to filter the tags in colorful 3D graphics using a special RFIG hand-held projector. Here’s how:
Scenario #1: The Storeroom
“The projector beams a temporally unique code for each pixel which is decoded by the photosensor on the tag. The tags can be battery-less because they detect light but do NOT transmit any light. Presence of light is binary 1 and absence is binary 0 in the temporal optical code. The tags respond via RF and transmit the (x,y) coordinate of the pixel that illuminated them. The projector when it receives those (x,y) coordinate from the RF reader, turns on a circle at that (x,y) location. This gives a visual feedback. (In this picture, e.g., red indicate boxes with products about to expire and green indicates otherwise.)

Scenario #2: The Library

“Finding which books are on the shelf within the RF range is easy with a traditional (handheld) RF reader. But how can one find out which books are out of the alphabetically sorted order ? With passive photosensing RFID attached to each book we can find the exact location of each book. So, one can verify if there is a mismatch between the list of books sorted by title versus list of books sorted by position coordinates. The mismatch can also be indicated by projecting the arrows back on the shelf indicating the correct position. (Green arrows.) We can also find out if any book is placed upside down. We attach two tags, one at the top and one at the bottom. Books for which the location of the two tags is reversed is marked as upside down. This is indicated visually with red arrows. ”

Ready to read more? One warning, go and get a cup of coffee, the page takes about a year to load, but it’s worth it if you want to see some innovation at work. Source: Ramesh Raskar, Paul Beardsley, Jeroen van Baar, Yao Wang, Paul Dietz, Johnny Lee, Darren Leigh, Thomas Willwacher, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs