Visual and tangible interactions with physical and virtual objects using context-aware RFID

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has recently received a lot of attention as an augmentation and interface technology with physical and virtual objects in the ubiquitous computing domain. As RFID tags can be attached to any items, they can be used to provide various ubiquitous and tangible interfaces. Although a new paradigm shift in computing environments offers various opportunities for extending existing RFID capabilities, most of the previous works have utilized only simple RAID IDs and their mappings such that a rich set of RFID capabilities has not been fully utilized. In this paper, we propose a visual, context-aware, and tangible interaction technique with physical and virtual objects using RFID. It combines context awareness with RFID for providing context-aware RFID services, which can seamlessly integrate physical worlds with virtual worlds in a user-oriented manner. The proposed approach adopts semantic ontology in order to systematically represent and reason about RFID-related contexts. Moreover, the rewritable characteristic of the RFID tag memory is utilized to manage the dynamic RFID context. Further, the paper presents how to support visual and tangible interactions with physical and virtual objects by combining context-aware RFID services with augmented reality. We will show the effectiveness and the novelty of the proposed approach by demonstrating several practical case studies. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.