What is RFID?

RFID quietly runs half the modern world: warehouse inventory, race timing, toll booths, hotel keys. But the technology itself is invisible, radio waves moving between a tag and a reader, so people encountering it for the first time have nothing to look at and nothing to picture. For atlasRFIDstore, an online retailer of RFID hardware, that invisibility was a business problem: customers can’t shop confidently for a technology they don’t understand.

I produced this video as atlasRFIDstore’s sole video producer, creating more than 95 instructional videos for the company’s YouTube channel, most of which were designed to answer questions customers actually asked. This one tackles the most fundamental question of all: what is RFID, and how does it work? RFID is invisible in action, so the explanation had to be built rather than shot, and I designed animated visuals that give the invisible parts something to look at: how a tag, an antenna, and a reader talk to each other, and where that conversation shows up in everyday life. The script came from atlasRFIDstore’s marketing director; everything else was mine. I designed and animated the graphics, recorded a colleague’s voice-over, and edited the final cut.

The video has been viewed more than 146K+ times and ranks alongside RFID Basics | How to Read & Write RFID Tags as one of the two most popular videos on the company’s YouTube channel.