An RFID-based Infrastructure for Automatically Determining the Position and Orientation of Game Objects in Tabletop Games1

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology already plays a major role in many areas. In business applications, for example, the idea of smart shelves or tables equipped with RFID technology has been around for some time now, especially for retailing. Current solutions, however, are designed to only identify objects in range, which is sufficient for most of the envisioned shop applications. For other uses, however, not only the identification, but also the exact position and orientation of objects would be interesting, if not necessary. A good example are miniature war games, where the current game state usually depends on what objects are located where, and, in some cases, how these objects are oriented. In this article, we present an approach to determine the position and orientation of (multi-tagged) objects. We introduce the conceptual idea, as well as the technical realization based on the example of an augmented miniature war game. We then describe our findings so far and summarize our next steps.