Violet Mir:ror

The French are experts at creating quirky technology and they don’t come quirkier than Violet’s Mir:ror RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) reader.

The Mir:ror starter kit ships with a Mir:ror USB RFID reader, two nano:ztag miniature RFID rabbits and three RFID ztamp:s adhesive tags to stick on everyday objects. The Mir:ror itself is a small white circular reader with an LED-illuminated rim that glows in several different colours depending on its status. There’s also a small audio beeper in it.

To get started, you create a user account at Violet’s website and download the Mirware application. Once your Mir:ror is connected, you need to assign actions to your RFID-enabled objects by placing one on the reader then registering and naming it either using the Mirware application or directly using your account area on the website.

Each tagged object gets its own unique email address, allowing you to do surreal things such as send emails to your umbrella. It will recognise any ISO-compliant RFID chip, so we could register both an Oyster card and an RFID-enabled Barclaycard as triggers to launch applications.

You can associate any number of applications with each object. There are several general-purpose apps such as ‘launch a program’ or ‘open a URL’ so you don’t need to do any programming to get started.

Available applications include launching a Youtube video, podcasts or RSS news services using text-to-speech conversions. The quality of text-to-speech isn’t brilliant, though. Applications can be chained together. There’s no easy way to create your own applications, but you can use a tag to send metadata to any web-based application.

Mir:ror has some good novelty value and is simple to use, although it’s not yet a must-have product. But as a technology demo, it’s impressive.