University of Washington researchers turn pieces of paper into connected devices

With household items increasingly becoming connected to the internet,  it may be the turn simple pieces of paper next. University of Washington researchers have turned pieces of paper into connected devices using 10-cent radio-frequency tags.

Researchers at the University of Washington in association with Disney created small stickers that could be pressed onto any piece of paper to give it sensing capabilities that allowed it connect to the digital world.

Computer-science and engineering doctoral students from the University of Washington, along with Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon researchers, created a way to attach small radio frequency, or RFID, tags onto pieces of paper. The sensor tags were then able to communicate with a reader device placed in the room to interpret gestures and perform commands.

The team hopes it would be useful for quick polls in classrooms and to spread digital connections to many items just by sticking or drawing RFID antennas on them.

''A piece of paper is still by far one of the most ubiquitous mediums,'' lead author and UW student Hanchuan Li said in a statement. ''If RFID tags can make interfaces as simple, flexible and cheap as paper, it makes good sense to deploy those tags anywhere.''

The RapID system could lead to the development of all kinds of inexpensively produced interactive toys and the functionality could also be incorporated into smart books with relatively little expense.

The system opens up some interesting potential uses for the passive RFID system, which depends on the power of an external reader. Such functionality results in high latency and inaccurate tracking, with the RapID framework reducing the lag time from two seconds to a far more workable 200 milliseconds.

According to Disney, ''Our approach couples a probabilistic filtering layer with a monte-carlo-sampling-based interaction layer, preserving uncertainty in tag reads until they can be resolved in the context of interactions. This allows designers' code to reason about inputs at a high level,  techcrunch.com reported.