The technologies are organized on a rough spectrum of "passive" to "active". Passive means the tracked objects do not need be instrumented or where instrumentation is less obtrusive (e.g. RFID). Passive also roughly equates to cheaper per tracked object. Active means tracked objects need powered electronics, etc on them.

I'm attaching a PDF of all the printouts I used to make this, for archiving and remote readers.

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On a meta-level, I find myself doing a lot of this "information gathering" activity. It's a significant portion of my screen usage time. Organizing the information in a physical space is a nice way to keep track of it all (contrast with tabs in a browser) and present it to others. The presentation mostly consists of "scrapbooking" activities, cropping, rescaling, pulling out quotes, writing comments.

I would love if this activity could be more fully pulled out of the screen, while at the same time adding more of the virtual information that the physical representation lacks. For example, I'd like to be able to link from my paper summaries to the original papers, or link from our pictures to the original emails, etc. I'd also like to include videos or short animations on the whiteboard (lenticulars? flip books?).

Physical whiteboards should also be digitally archivable, with photographs linked appropriately to their digital printouts (e.g. the PDF I attached).

While reading papers, it should be really easy to pull up any citations. I've been using Google Scholar's "related papers" feature. Unfortunately this often hits paywalls.