It seems that toys for kids these days aren’t as cheap as they used to be, but it looks like thanks to the folks at Disney Research, they have come up with a way to use RFID to help create low-cost games that are interactive. How this is done is through the company’s development of a system called RapID.
The concept of RapID is similar to RFID, except that in the case of RapID, recognition time is considerably faster than that of RFID. For example RFID readers can take up to 2 seconds to read tags on luggages or other items, but in the case of RapID, Disney Research is boasting that it could take as little as 200 milliseconds.
To demonstrate their RapID in action, they have created an interactive game of tic-tac-toe in which objects placed on the physical board will show up on a computer screen complete with animation and sound effects. The idea is that since producing these tags are so cheap, you could essentially place them on just about anything.
According to Disney Research’s paper, “We demonstrated how a designer can use RFID tags to add inexpensive, wireless, low-footprint, batteryless, low-latency input sensing to objects. […] By making it easy to add RFID-based sensing to objects, RapID enables the design of new, custom interactive objects with a very fast development cycle.”
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