There are a lot of creepy uses for RFiD tags, but these robotic chairs that follow the tag in your library card to follow you around while you browse to provide anywhere seating is pretty cute [via Digg]. Watch the video for the example of using the same technology to easily put together group seating areas. There are tons of other neat applications for this – conference rooms or classrooms or really any large meeting space could benefit from easy chair (and table?) rearrangement. What about walking into an airport and having a tag in your boarding pass allow you to be followed around by personal seating? In any of these applications, scaling up would probably require the seating to be aware of each other to avoid bottlenecks or poor utilization of space. It feels similar to some of the swarm robotics problems you see in a different wrapper.
Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek