I was glad to have gone to Microsoft Mix It Up event. It is a quarterly event for developers to get together to share information and demos of up and coming developers’ showcase. I will blog about the event in another post. I am not a developer. However, when HNL (Human Network Labs) presented their product, I was overwhelm by the potential of this product, Pixie Engine.
The product is not available in Singapore yet. However, in US, it is marketed as a child locator.
What is HNL Pixie Engine? It is a technology that uses RF signal to precisely locate nearby objects. I am talking about 1m radius (which I think is super good).
It is like GPS but with superb accuracy. It is not a RFID tag. It is an active device (while RFID is a passive device) that can interact with another Pixie Engine tag.
When the HNL tag is connected via Bluetooth (Ver 2.0 and above) and coupled with the software, it will be able to show the 360 degrees of nearby objects (can be object, people or anything that is tag with HNL tags). It can capture direction, height and etc which I have not seen before.
Click Here to Watch a Video Demo
It is difficult to explain as I may explain wrongly. Below are slides that I have captured during the presentation. Hope that it will help in explaining this Pixie Engine technology.
Below is an example of how HNL product can be used as a people/belongings tracking tool.
Below shows how the ID can be configured. For example, on the left, it is configured as public but email and phone number is invisible. And on the right, the information is visible only to a person or a group of people.
It can even plot the path that was taken.
All in all, there are a lot of potential for this product. The above is the contact to HNL in Singapore.
In my opinion, the downside of this product is that you will need to purchase it and you need to charge it in order to use it. When it comes to water or heavy rain, the results will be affected.
However, having said that, they could actually reduce the size of it and hide it under the battery cover of phones (not iPhone) and also, they could work with phone companies to incorporate their chip into the sets and using the phone battery as power.
There are many potentials for this product and it could only take off if the price is right and the usage is easy.
Click Here to Go to their Official Website (not very ready yet)
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