Browsing the World with RFID Tags: Design and Implementation of an RFID-Based Distributed Environmental Memory

The increasing diffusion of pervasive computing technologies via which to interact with the physical world, together with the availability of innovative GIS-like tools relying on standard Web technologies (e.g., Google Earth and Google Maps) let us envision a future in which it will be possible to access in an undifferentiated way real-time information about the physical world, Web information and services, and to transparently merge them into a single coherent user-centric and location-dependent perspective. In this chapter, after having introduced the general underlying concepts and presented current related research initiatives, we illustrate a general user-centric architecture for “browsing the world” and show some services we developed.