Real innovation with RFID at tech.ed Australia
One of the most amazing and geeky things I’ve seen at tech.ed Australia is the RFID tags and avatars. As you walk into a room for a session, the count goes up, we know how many people are in the room – we can see their avatars – and we can see instantly what they like when they registered their preferences. (I blogged about this the other week) So I could tell how many people in the session like rock, blog, use twitter or see the type of avatar they’ve loaded. All in real time. Here are a few screenshots:
These are avatars leaving the hall – the display behind shows attendance at previous tech.ed’s by the avatars actually in the Exhibition hall at the moment.
Someone else leaving the hall and a different display scrolling round. There weren’t too many people around at this time as these shots were taken during a session.
Two way traffic. Sometimes there were loads of people emptying and leaving – unfortunately not a the right time to show the scrolling!
Here’s the web view of a live room which is filling up at the moment.
As attendees walk in, the screen changes showing how many seats are free, what the audience split is, what social networking sites they use. Fascinating stuff.
What’s really geeky is the fact that all you have to do is flash your badge around as you’re going around the Exhibition hall and your avatar pops up – and your preferences too.
Here’s Norbert, the leader of the Evangelism group here in Australia, showing all of the information that appears when you put your badge down on surface and scrolling right down from world level, country, street level – then showing the image of the convention centre using Live Earth. Just an ad hoc demo, but showing the capabilities of Surface, the RFID application and just how well everything integrates. He looked like he’d been using Surface for ages – not just a few minutes…
So this collection of technologies has really blown me away. This would be great if it was rolled around the tech.ed’s around the world as for me it’s been the most fascinating part of the conference. The “boiler room” where the RFID ops room is, has been open all week, so anyone can walk in and out and see how things work, and watch the live displays of the avatars going in and out of the main hall, the rooms etc. Totally brilliant. totally innovative. Lost of Silverlight. Lots of Surface
More please in other tech.ed’s …
