*One can really wish that RFID had gently oozed out of a design lab like this, instead of being brutally and rather unsuccessfully imposed from on high by Wal-Mart and the US Defense Department.
http://www.nearfield.org/2009/10/immaterials-the-ghost-in-the-field
Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.
This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation. It features Timo Arnall of the Touch project and Jack Schulze of BERG.
The problem and opportunity of invisibility
RFID is still badly understood as an interactive technology. Many aspects of RFID interaction are fundamentally invisible; as users we experience two objects communicating through the ‘magic’ of radio waves. This invisibility is also key to the controversial aspects of RFID technology; once RFID antennas are hidden inside products or in environments, they can be invoked or initiated without explicit knowledge or permission. (See here for more on the invisibility of radio.)
But invisibility also offers opportunities: the lack of touch is an enormous usability and efficiency leap for many systems we interact with everyday (hence the success of Oyster, Suica and Octopus cards). But there is also the ‘magic’ of nearness one of the most compelling experiential aspects of RFID.
As designers we took this invisibility as a challenge. We needed to know more about the way that RFID technology inhabits space so that we could better understand the kinds of interactions that can be built with it and the ways it can be used effectively and playfully inside physical products.
The experiments
In order to study the readable volume around an RFID reader, we built experimental probes that would flash an LED light when they successfully read an RFID tag. ...
