Ravi Pappu discusses new applications for passive RFID technology, which uses radio waves to identify objects within millimeters to tens of meters without contact or line of sight. He notes that battery-assisted passive RFID systems can identify tags from over 100 meters away and some readers can scan between 200 to 1200 tags per second with up to 100% accuracy. Pappu suggests this technology could enable new real-time, ultra-local search applications by allowing computers to see nearby objects.