Tesla User Interfaces - Wireless and Batteryless Tangible Interaction

Diploma Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1,3, LMU Munich (Institut für Informatik), course: Medieninformatik, language: English, abstract: Radio frequency identification (RFID) still owns a 'black-box' image in the mental models of most people. With the current trends to enhance this technology with other functionalities and sensors, this mystical image even gets worse. Despite the fact that there is relative constant amount of scientific publications working with the RFID technology, only few accurately classified works exist, that provide an holistic understanding of this technology. From the view of an user interaction designer it is hardly possible to utilize the remarkable benefits of RFID technology with the current state of science. By an exemplary design of wireless devices, this thesis investigates the RFID technology and draws an in-depth picture of its current state. This is done on a theoretical level with the introduction of the 2013 RFID taxonomy, as well as with three series of enhanced RFID tag prototypes, that have been built to gain practical knowledge in this field. The final prototype implements a music player that is controlled by a set of RFID control widgets. This also is a first application of the Tesla User Interface idea. By comparing and evaluating these approaches, the usefulness for human computer interaction (HCI) was verified, even though this should be done attentively. A whole spectrum of concrete future work in the field of electronic engineering, networking and HCI are proposed as an important result of this work.