RFID Journal and Rush Tracking Systems, a systems integrator in Lenexa, Kan., will unveil the world’s first RFID-enabled football and golf arcade games at RFID Journal LIVE! 2006, RFID Journal’s fourth annual conference and exhibition, being held in Las Vegas, May 1-3.
The arcade games, dubbed RFID@PLAY, will be on the floor of the 50,000-square-foot exhibition hall. For the RFID-enabled football toss, attendees will be asked to throw a tagged football into one of three holes, the smallest of which will score the most points. Each hole will be fitted with an RFID interrogator antenna. Before making a pass, an attendee will swipe his or her show badge, which will contain an RFID tag, and the system will record which hole the ball goes through, keeping track of the attendee’s total score for five attempts. The person with the current highest score will be displayed throughout the day.
For the golf game, attendees will need to make a putt. The game will offer three levels of difficulty, awarding higher scores as the putts become more difficult. The RFID system will record the hole the ball enters and associate the points for each successful putt with the appropriate attendee, using the show badge tags to identify who makes each shot. The system will then display the highest score.
Each attendee who plays one of the RFID-enabled games will receive an RFID Journal hat, and his or her name will be entered into a random drawing to win one of two flat-screen televisions donated by Hewlett-Packard.
Rush Tracking will link the data to some of the aggregate attendee data to demonstrate how RFID can be used to create a wide variety of reports. For instance, using middleware provided by BEA Systems, Rush Tracking will be able to show how scores of attendees from large companies differ from those of small companies’ attendees, or how systems integrators fare versus end users or vendors, and so forth. Symbol Technologies will supply the RFID interrogators for the games.
“When RFID Journal approached us about working on this project, I was intrigued,” says Toby Rush, president of Rush Tracking Systems. “It sounded like both something fun for the attendees and something that could demonstrate to people some of the capabilities of an RFID system. Hopefully, the attendees will have as much fun playing the games as we had putting them together.”