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

Steve Hinske1 and Marc Langheinrich Institute for Pervasive Computing, ETH 
Zurich Clausiusstr. 59, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland {steve.hinske, 
marc.langheinrich}@inf.ethz.ch 

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.