honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, April 30, 2002

Tiny wireless wonders will redefine convenience

By Kevin Maney
USA Today

In Singapore, cars "talk" to the streets they drive on.

In Tulsa, Okla., retailers test a system that lets products inform the store when they're bought.

In home kitchens later this decade, frozen dinners might automatically give cooking instructions to microwave ovens.

The Internet revolution was about people connecting with people. The next revolution will be about things connecting with things. And it's taking shape in pockets around the globe. For the first time, big companies such as Wal-Mart, Gillette and Procter & Gamble are joining to give the technology serious momentum.

In a twist, this next technological chapter won't emerge out of ever-more-powerful computers and faster Internet connections. This shift comes from the opposite direction. It will ride on pieces of plastic the size of postage stamps, costing a nickel or less. Each plastic tag will contain a computer chip, which can store a small amount of information, and a minuscule antenna that lets the chip communicate with a network.

In time, when billions of tags are out there and communicating, the technology will infiltrate business and everyday life to a greater extent than today's personal computers, cell phones or e-mail. In decades to come, its impact might be as fundamental as the invention of the light bulb.

Those tags will someday be on everything — egg cartons, eyeglasses, books, toys, trucks, money and so on. All those items will be able to wirelessly connect to networks or the Internet, sending information to computers, home appliances or other electronic devices.

Grocery items will tell the store what needs to be restocked and which items are past their expiration dates. The groceries will check themselves out in a split second as you push a full cart past a reader. A wine lover could look on a computer screen and see what's in her wine cellar. Prescription drug bottles could work together to send you a warning if the combination of pills you're about to swallow would be toxic.

"Any single one of these (tags) is like a one-celled organism," said Glover Ferguson, chief scientist at consulting firm Accenture. "They're just smart enough to say their own name." Like cells, their power will come from billions of them working together, he said.

"We're really talking about the next 50 years of computing," said Kevin Ashton, executive director of the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Auto-ID is the program backed by Wal-Mart and the other companies, and the center is trying to create a standard, like Internet protocol, for the tags' communication. That would enable any tag to connect to any network, much as any PC can work on any network.

The technology doesn't really have a handy name. The tags are known as radio-frequency identification tags, or RFID. The Auto-ID center calls the core of its standard "ePC," which stands for Electronic Product Code.

Perhaps an appropriate umbrella name might be tinyband. Today's hefty computers and super-fast fiber-optic networks communicate on broadband technology. Tomorrow's little nickel tags will work on tinyband technology and as little as 96 characters of information.

Traffic control via RFIDs

RFID has been around awhile. During World War II, the military used a high-powered, bulky version of it to identify friendly aircraft. Starting in the 1970s, the federal government stuck RFID tags on nuclear materials to better track them. In the 1980s, commercial warehouses used it to locate loaded pallets.

These days RFID shows up in a few familiar places. The technology is in ExxonMobil's Speedpass — a key fob that works like a credit card, wirelessly identifying you to a gas pump. On highways across the United States, wireless toll-booth systems such as E-ZPass work on RFID.

Singapore relies on the technology to control traffic. Its system, called Electronic Road Pricing, or ERP, charges different prices to drive on different roads at different times. Driving on one main artery between 8:30 and 9 a.m. costs $3 (in Singapore dollars — about $1.60 in U.S. currency) but is free from 2 to 5:30 p.m. The pricing encourages drivers to stay off busy roads at busy times. Every car must have an RFID tag, and it communicates with readers along every major road. The road readers identify each car and send the information to a central computer, which adds up the car owners' bills.

Tag to the rescue

Widespread consumer use of tinyband will take time — perhaps a decade or more. That's what happens with new technology. Computers didn't move from businesses to homes until more than 30 years after the technology was born.

Some chastise tinyband proponents for promising too much too soon. "You have to manage realistic expectations," said Cliff Horwitz, CEO of SAMSys, which is making a universal reader that can talk to tags from any manufacturer. For the foreseeable future, "MIT has a pretty extreme and unrealistic view of the world."

Others, though, can't contain their excitement. The real fun will start once the price of a tag gets down to around a penny. Then adding a tag would be no more expensive than stamping a bar code on a product. Bar codes today are on nearly every item made for consumers and business. Imagine that every one of those things will have a small amount of intelligence and ability to communicate. The world around us would almost come alive.

Arno Penzias — a Nobel prize-winning scientist, one-time head of Bell Labs and an investor in Alien Technology — has a favorite microcosmic scenario:

You lose your eyeglasses. They've fallen under the family room couch.

The tag on the eyeglasses connects with a reader in the family room — readers would be all around a house. The reader is also getting signals from everything else in the room.

Tags work a little like radar. A reader sends out a signal looking for tags. The signal excites the tag — the tag itself has no power —and causes it to return a signal containing its information. This request and return of a signal happens more than 100 times a second for each tag.

The reader pipes its information across a wireless network and dumps it into the home computer. The computer looks at the data and deduces that the signal from the glasses takes the same amount of time to hit the reader as the signal from the couch.

You sit at the computer and type in a search box: "Where are my eyeglasses?" The computer spits back: "Under the couch."

"In a few years, high-end consumers will likely start using tag readers to locate items in the house," Penzias said.

Aside from technology challenges, tinyband will increasingly test society's acceptance. Privacy will certainly be an issue. For instance, insurance companies might want to use the technology to know where you take your car, so they can charge more if you regularly park in high-crime neighborhoods.

Privacy "is an issue. There will have to be a social discourse about what we want and don't want," said Accenture's Ferguson. "But the technology isn't going away: You can't un-invent it."