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RFID Climbs Mountains in Italian Alps
Veglia-Devero Nature Park is using active UHF tags to provide hikers with video and audio media explaining the site's features.
By Claire Swedberg
Mar. 3, 2011—Tourists exploring the Italian Alps last summer at Parco Naturale Veglia-Devero (Veglia-Devero Nature Park) hiked the mountainous trails with an RFID reader in hand. The reserve, located along Italy's border with Switzerland, installed a series of RFID tags along approximately 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of its trails. Each tag stores a unique identifier that links to data regarding a specific location, enabling a tourist to use the handheld device to access information about animals, plants and other aspects of the park's natural history. The solution was designed and installed by multimedia company Demetra, using RFID hardware provided by Italian value-added distributor Softwork, which also helped design the RFID functionality of software that links data from tags with specific media.
The 8,500-hectare (21,000-acre) park, established in 1995, receives visits from 60,000 to 80,000 people annually. Some of those visitors have disabilities, such as hearing or visual impairments, so the park sought a system that would bring information to disabled individuals, as well as to the very young and elderly, who may have trouble reading signage, that would be easy to use and engaging for all visitors. "Our starting point was to look for a solution that was characterized by high automation," says Daniele Piazza, Veglia-Devero Nature Park's project manager and consultant.
The park considered several wireless options (including GPS solutions) to provide information to visitors without requiring signage or paper leaflets, but determined that RFID transmissions would be more reliable. When weighing automated versus non-automated options, it chose automation with RFID since that would require no action on the part of a visitor, such as pressing a touch screen or a button. What's more, the park found that RFID, with only a tag incorporated in a wooden post, would not interfere with the landscape's aesthetics.
The park installed the RFID-based guide system, known as Didà, for the summer season of 2010. The project was funded by Italy's Piedmont Region, as well as by Cariplo Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports cultural, scientific and environmental projects. The tags were embedded in wooden posts along popular trails in July, where they remained until October, when the hiking season ends due to winter weather. In August, the park asked visitors to fill out a questionnaire describing their impressions of the system. "The impressions were quite favorable for the easy use of the system," Piazza says, "and also for the quality of multimedia contents."
The data that visitors can access includes descriptions of the types of trees and flowers in that area, as well as traits of the land formation and the history and legends associated with the local environment.
At 13 locations, Demetra installed a wooden post with an active i-B2 UHF (868 MHz) RFID tag from Identec Solutions embedded in it, says Gabriele Villa, Demetra's technical director. At 10 of those locations, the tag was linked to regarding points of interest in the vicinity of the post . At three separate locations, where trails divided, the tags were linked to data regarding what lay ahead on each trail. Every tag transmitted its ID number approximately once per second, with up to a 10-meter (33-foot) read range.
Mar. 3, 2011—Tourists exploring the Italian Alps last summer at Parco Naturale Veglia-Devero (Veglia-Devero Nature Park) hiked the mountainous trails with an RFID reader in hand. The reserve, located along Italy's border with Switzerland, installed a series of RFID tags along approximately 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of its trails. Each tag stores a unique identifier that links to data regarding a specific location, enabling a tourist to use the handheld device to access information about animals, plants and other aspects of the park's natural history. The solution was designed and installed by multimedia company Demetra, using RFID hardware provided by Italian value-added distributor Softwork, which also helped design the RFID functionality of software that links data from tags with specific media.
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| Demetra embedded RFID tags in 13 wooden posts, some of which supported informational signs. |
The park considered several wireless options (including GPS solutions) to provide information to visitors without requiring signage or paper leaflets, but determined that RFID transmissions would be more reliable. When weighing automated versus non-automated options, it chose automation with RFID since that would require no action on the part of a visitor, such as pressing a touch screen or a button. What's more, the park found that RFID, with only a tag incorporated in a wooden post, would not interfere with the landscape's aesthetics.
The park installed the RFID-based guide system, known as Didà, for the summer season of 2010. The project was funded by Italy's Piedmont Region, as well as by Cariplo Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports cultural, scientific and environmental projects. The tags were embedded in wooden posts along popular trails in July, where they remained until October, when the hiking season ends due to winter weather. In August, the park asked visitors to fill out a questionnaire describing their impressions of the system. "The impressions were quite favorable for the easy use of the system," Piazza says, "and also for the quality of multimedia contents."
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| Softwork's Paola Visentin |
At 13 locations, Demetra installed a wooden post with an active i-B2 UHF (868 MHz) RFID tag from Identec Solutions embedded in it, says Gabriele Villa, Demetra's technical director. At 10 of those locations, the tag was linked to regarding points of interest in the vicinity of the post . At three separate locations, where trails divided, the tags were linked to data regarding what lay ahead on each trail. Every tag transmitted its ID number approximately once per second, with up to a 10-meter (33-foot) read range.
