I just returned from a trip to Japan and while in Tokyo I attended an exhibition at the Mori Art Museum that was simply amazing. The show was called Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art and overall the artists that participated were fantastic, with most of them creating pieces specifically for the show. However, the exhibition included one piece in particular that stands out as the best artistic use of RFID that I have seen.
I had originally wanted to build this project with my Parallax RFID reader, but since I can’t interface it with the Make Controller until Liam at MakingThings fixes the serial BLOB implementation fixed in mchelper 2.0, I decided to complete a proof-of-concept with a Phidgets RFID reader. The application is pretty straightforward - it consists of an RFID tag embedded in a cell phone that is read for its unique ID, prompts a user to enter some data and then remembers their personal data when they return. While the premise is simple, there are a few moving parts required to stitch it together.