Tiny printable transmitters invisibly embedded in packaging might one day allow a customer to walk a cart full of groceries or other goods past a scanner on the way to the car. The scanner would read all items in the cart at once, total them up, and charge the customer’s account while adjusting the store’s inventory.
More advanced versions could collect all the information about the contents of a store in an instant, letting a retailer know where every package is at any time. These radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags printed through a new roll-to-roll process could feasibly one day replace bar codes. The technology was developed by a team from Rice University and Sunchon National University in Korea.
Full story at Futurity.