Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA’s hot property for the Cebit computer fair in Hannover this year is the Active Badge system, an infra-red badge developed at its Cambridge research laboratory here in the UK and designed for access control and location applications. The company also launched a line of multimedia personal computers and a bubblejet printer. The Active Badge is designed as an interface between wearers and buildings, acting as a paging, tracking and monitoring tool. It is about 1.5 square and incorporates an application-specific integrated circuit developed at the Cambridge lab. It operates by exchanging infra-red signals with a network of sensors installed around the building, which are in turn connected to an Ethernet. The sensors are effective over distances of up to 50 feet. Olivetti has configured the Active Badge to be MS-DOS- and Windows-compliant and is looking for software developers interested in developing applications for it. Installing a monitoring system in a 135,000 square foot building for 50 to 70 employees would cost $200 to $250 per person. The new M6 Suprema line of multimedia machines consists of three 80486-based Pentium-ready models with local bus-connected graphics subsystem and audio subsystem with Microsoft Corp’s Windows Sound System. The JB250 bubblejet printer for word processing and graphics does 300 dots per inch and three pages per minute and has 13 resident fonts; it is around $400 and arrives May.
