.Dust

We’re all fas­ci­nated by the bright future we’re going to have thanks to the RFID tech­nolo­gies. It hap­pens monthly, some­where and some­times experts start all together to talk about RFID, new imple­men­ta­tions, new tags, new per­for­mances and, obvi­ously, new cus­tomers. Monthly, because there is a process and a time­frame to respect: the scoop, the under­stand­ing, a bit of crit­i­cism and a bit of appre­ci­a­tion too, and then the obliv­ion, just in time for new cycle to start.
It’s impor­tant to notice that even the same top­ics go back and forth, so an appli­ca­tion described about ten cycles ago, could be pro­posed again, in a new shape or even in the same old one, because peo­ple doesn’t remem­ber it.
Let’s go back to RFID. As in a recipe descrip­tion, we need a hand­ful of Tags, a writer to write (!) some­thing in, a reader or more for read­ing (!!) what we pre­vi­ously wrote, an appli­ca­tion for receiv­ing lots and lots and lots and lots (…) of data and trans­late sequence of bits into icons or names, and some­one that can under­stand all of this stuff.
Easy, isn’t it? All of us, with a tech­ni­cal and “social” back­ground, are ready to invent appli­ca­tions that could apply to this set of ingre­di­ents. Despite of read­ing dis­tance, inter­fer­ences, tag dimen­sions, antenna power, read­ing speed and simul­tane­ity issues, and even tag costs (wow, they worth some­thing!!!), the most bril­liant of us start to sim­u­late the per­fect world where tags rules against all odds. The first, the num­ber one of these solu­tions is the retail bas­ket: fill it with all of the goods you want, step towards the cashier and a magic sound announce you that all of the items you col­lected were auto­mat­i­cally read by “the Gate”, and don’t ask for more. You have to pay the bill and leave the shop, no con­ges­tion, no queues, no con­trol, if you unin­ten­tion­ally put an item in your pocket, don’t worry, the Gate read it too. The RFID Guru every eight or ten cycles put this excit­ing inno­va­tion in their arti­cles, it’s about ten years or more that hun­dreds of house­keep­ers are wait­ing for this. All right, where’s the prob­lem, we need a tag for every prod­uct in the super­mar­ket, even fresh fruits, even a 10cent nee­dle (with a 50cent tag on it, wrapped around…) Tags are going to be as small as rice? Yes, but…how far you can read a tag so small? How it works the read­ing process, with a pas­sive tag that needs to be acti­vated before to trans­mit, and needs an antenna related to the dis­tance from the reader? And what about a tag that remains under bot­tles, paper, bis­cuits? Which kind of antenna (and power) we need for such a cor­rect read­ing pro­ce­dure, with no errors and omis­sions? Look, all of these pro­ce­dures are already imple­mented, they work, but the stuff we need is expen­sive, lim­i­ta­tions are strong enough that no real imple­men­ta­tions could be pos­si­ble.
I think it’s time to stop to talk about RFID tags, only to cap­ture peo­ple with false sce­nar­ios, with­out think­ing at what is a tag, which kind of tag, read­able, writable, wash­able, reusable, valuable…

Why do I blog this ?
It seems that a pow­er­ful idea, a pow­er­ful tech­nol­ogy, is going to be mis­un­der­stand­ing and mis­use; some sim­ple and more effec­tive appli­ca­tions could be made with RFID tech­nol­ogy but prob­a­bly they don’t look so appeal­ing and note­wor­thy. Let’s try to give some evi­dence on these.

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