At the Institute, we've come to the conclusion that entertainment is now a significant area for experimentation with technology and social practices. Instant messaging, P2P, and blogging all started out as fun, and have migrated (or are in the process of migrating) into the workplace.
Of course, entertainment is also a big industry, which drives other technological innovations and experiments. The most recent New Scientist reports on one: casinos are looking at putting RFID tags into their chips.
The chips will be launched later in 2004 and will allow casino operators to spot counterfeits and thefts, and also to monitor the behaviour of gamblers....Counterfeit chips have long been a problem for casinos, and houses routinely mark their chips with inks visible only in infrared or ultraviolet light. Embedded RFID tags should make the chips much harder to counterfeit, and placing tag readers at staff exits could cut down on theft by employees.
The tags could also help casinos manage large-scale theft. If a large stash of chips goes missing after a table is overturned during an argument, for example casinos sometimes have to change their entire stock. This is unpopular with gamblers, since any chips that they have not cashed become worthless. RFID tags would allow the casinos to identify stolen chips without the expensive process of restocking.
Aside from improving security, the tags could also be used to track how people play in a casino.... The tagged chips would allow casino operators to keep tabs on the fortunes of every gambler on their premises, recording the stakes placed by each player along with their winnings and losses. American casino operators routinely monitor gamblers with security cameras, just as retailers monitor stores for shoplifters.
The casinos want to check that big winners are not cheating the house, and to identify lucrative "high rollers" and encourage them to keep playing by treating them to free meals, show tickets, or hotel rooms.
But this monitoring has to be done by human observers and is haphazard and unreliable. Chip tracking could dramatically improve the process.
Casinos-- and highly organized gambling more generally-- are fascinating for their use of technology. They have some of the most sophisticated security systems in the world, which is hardly a surprise. More interesting, the space of the casino is carefully designed to keep people playing: not only does the flow of casino spaces take you past all manner of enticements, all that garish design is actually crafted to slightly disorient players, to encourage them to stay at the table or slot machine, and the help them lose track of time. (You won't find a clock on a casino wall.) And the industry spends a lot of money keeping track of who plays-- recording high rollers' drink preferences and dogs' names, but also watching who's doing what on the floor. (Some of these technologies are detailed in this article from Wired Magazine.) Given this, the fact that it would be looking at using RFID to keep track of chips, and to help refine their ability to monitor what players are doing, makes perfect sense.
Indeed, there may be a larger lesson here. Privacy advocates spin scenarios of RFID "spy chips" being used to track us in malls, or follow our children in the park. But some of the most enthusiastic early adopters of RFID for monitoring purposes are industries that are already big on such efforts. In other words, if you want to see where RFID will be used for tracking people, look at places that have lots of security cameras. And no clocks.
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