Carnegie Mellon Students Devise RFID-enabled Mirror

"I know people have been saying the price of tags needs to be below five cents" in order to make a solution viable, Sethiwan notes, but he says he found that the tags the team purchased—priced at about 21 cents apiece—were, on average, approximately 13 cents more expensive than plain bar-coded hangtags. That extra 13-cent expense, he predicts, will be offset by the increased sales generated by the system.

The team expects that the primary customers for this system would be large retail chains, and plans to focus its next pilot project on that target market, in order to demonstrate that the system can work on a larger scale. The group also intends to develop two software packages, Chia says. One package would operate a simple smart mirror that would suggest other products that could complement a specific garment (similar to the PC system being tested at Charles Spiegel), while the other would operate a more expansive system that would be integrated with a store's inventory system, and would support purchasing and inventory control, as well as the smart mirror.

At Charles Spiegel's boutique, the RFID interrogator was installed at the end of an aisle toward the rear of the store. As customers come within 10 to 15 feet of it, the reader has been successfully capturing each garment's ID number and then providing media content that is catching shoppers' attention.

"At this point, it's been great," Spiegel says. "The RFID portion is working extremely well. I'd call it a resounding success."

If used in a dressing room, the data could be displayed on or beside the mirror, with a reader prompting images to appear on a touch-screen LCD panel. According to the students, each interrogator would cost approximately $1,000.