This library lets visitors rearrange the books organically (if you pull out multiple books on a topic, you're encouraged to put them back on the shelf together instead of finding their old homes). The books are tracked with RFID so that they remain easy to find individually.
I can understand the experiment, the dewey-decimal system doesn't have to be the ultimate in organisation.
Source: the door-opening sensors at my college, many years ago, were all located at the right height for a key in the back pocket to activate them. I referred to it as the "buttprint identification system".
At my school, I had to jump up quite a bit (and I am 6' tall) to get them to read the card.
In many installations of both hardware and software, the actual usage of the system is quite different from what was imagined by the designers. Prox card installers imagine people holding up cards on lanyards. They mandate it not be carried in a wallet, because "the magnetic fields of a credit card can erase it" and it might break if it's bent. In real life, only freshmen carry lanyards, credit cards use high-coercivity stripes and aren't damaged by the prox readers or cards, and wallets with IDs and credit cards are stiff enough.
Talk to your users about how they use your product and what they need! You will learn something!
You can reload the passes online, the lift attendants can check everyone's pass just by waving a scanner across a crowd (no more having to precisely line up a barcode), you get online stats and achievements at the end of the day, and if you have photos taken on the hill they automatically show up in your online account.
So ya, definitely some really cool stuff you can do with them. :)
My co-worker solves by unlocking the front door when the home server sees his phone's (and his wife's phone's) MAC address on the home wi-fi network. (But only during "waking hours" so the server doesn't leave the door unlocked when everyone is sleeping.)
I think that story deserves a little elaboration.
EDIT: Wow, this is apparently a thing. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_implant_(human)#Hobb...
I went to a piercing study, girl stamped a hole in the upper layers of my skin, made a small cut to open it up a bit further, slid in the ampule (which had been autoclaved first of course). Band aid on it, done. It was strange being in a studio with a bunch of people with facial tattoos and horn implants and discs the size of my wrist in their ears - and them looking at me like I was a freak from out of space. I do have to say though that I had to search around a bit to find someone willing to do it. There are plenty of places that will take your money to suspend you from their ceiling with flesh hooks in your back, but that won't stick a glass pill under your skin. Go figure.
You can also buy kits online if you want to DIY - basically big needle guns that are used to tag cattle which you just jam into your hand and pull the trigger on, literally. That would've been a bit too hard core for me, tbh.
It shows real commitment to the tech. And also, it looks cool when you can make machines do stuff with just a wave of your hand. Sorcery!
More interesting, in my opinion, is "surgically" inserting a little magnet into the tip of one of your fingers, which then vibrates in magnetic fields such that your nerves can feel it.
This gives you a sixth sense - you can sense magnetic fields.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-getting-m...
It's the same (exact?) thing as far as I'm aware; rice-sized glass bit with a tiny RFID chip inside.
Might be cool in a car.
...maybe that's how the batmobile works.
Btw, I went to the demo of enerscore (which looks pretty interesting) and it wasn't working for me. I'm on Firefox last build and OSX if that helps. :)
Well, boring for users perhaps. For people who like to track you, it is certainly not boring. It is more like fingerprint heaven!
I used to have an rfid chip implanted in my hand. I had all these ideas of what I was going to do with it - log on to my computer by putting an rfid reader in my keyboard, build a magic 'touch the wall and music starts playing' thing etc. All of them turned out to be very boring and useless in practice. Logging into my machine - meh, turns out that it takes longer for monitors to come back on than to type the password. Building (useful) user interfaces based on rfid is very hard and doesn't add anything over a regular proximity sensor.
The only idea I have left is that in my current house, I have a place where I could put an rfid reader so that if I'd get a chip implanted in my gluteus maximus (my butt, essentially) I could activate an automatic door opener by bumping into it when I have my hands full. I just can't motivate myself to set this up and discovering again that it's a dud in real life.