Visualizing RFID

jamie found a video on Warren Ellis's blog introducing a new way to visualize RFID fields. The film is by Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze. The subject is introduced in words on the BERG site (a design consultancy); the tech behind it is explored at Touch, a project that experiments with near-field communications. "This image is a photographic mapping of the readable volume of a radio field from an RFID reader. The black component in the image is an RFID reader... The camera has been fixed in its position and the reader photographed. Using a tag connected to an LED we paint in the edges of the readable volume with a long exposure and animate them to show the form."

Comments

... for a given antenna and receiver sensitivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, anything radio is not theoretically limited in range. Only practical implementations have set limits.

Re:Matlab

[NixieBunny]

The main reason they did this is to map out the field *interaction* between the RFID tag and the reader, which is not a trivial thing to visualize based on the two data sheets.

Re:Interesting, but not amazing

[digitig]

The subtlety seems to be that they're not plotting an RF field, they're plotting the volume in which the passive tag will respond to an RF field (of a given strength). It's another level of abstraction. Yes, once somebody has come up with the idea then the implementation looks simple enough, but the idea is quite remarkable.