As our interaction design students get deeper into prototyping with RFID, we needed to start looking at the range of possibilities around the materials and forms of RFID tags. Last week we created a demonstration board of all the RFID tags that we have collected over the last year. Most of these tags are available from places like Mannings in the UK and Trossen robotics in the US.

The range includes ‘ampoule’ tags for embedding in animals, or under human skin, wristbands, tough plastic ‘pills’, CD labels, palette labels, outdoor labels, sticker-backed tags, various key fobs, playing cards, credit cards and pedagogic clear tags.

One of our students, Einar, has started making standard RFID reading modules using mini Arduino’s and the tiny ID12 reader, which is becoming the standard way for students to explore low-frequency RFID systems alongside the Phidget USB reader.

This gave the possibility of measuring the read-ranges of the 30 or so tags that we have. So now we have a good idea of the relative ranges of each size and kind of tag, which is very useful as we start to design all sorts of interactions around them. We are looking forward to seeing what opportunities emerge as the students explore the intricate details of RFID interactions, and the material possibilities for RFID form factors.

30 April 2007 by Timo