Four smart dressing-rooms, two intelligent shelves, three smart display tables and a smart mirror. No, not something out of Tom Cruise's Minority Report, but what's being RFID-enabled on the sales floor of Metro's Galeria-Kaufhof division in Essen.
It means Metro is able to claim the world's first end-to-end, UHF, item level application, with items being tagged at Metro's distribution store and tracked until point of sale.
The pilot is a showcase example of all the EPCglobal RFID standards in action: EPC Class 1, Gen 2 tags, fixed and handheld readers using the low-level reader protocol, an Application Level Events (ALE) standard, and even an implementation of EPC Information Services (EPC IS) to support the mutual sharing, retrieval and analysis of RFID-generated data, as RFID Journal reports.
With such a mass of standards, and use of EPC IS still in its infancy, you could expect this pilot to run for a while, and it will - until at least the end of 2008.
