This is a great step towards the internet of things. The main roadblock for attaching sensors to everything right now is power. Even with month or even year-long battery life the maintenance burden and cost makes it much less attractive.
If you could just stick a rice-sized sensor wherever you want and not worry about battery life we'd all have 'smart houses' by now.
This could not be used for 'smart houses' .. willscott had it right when he mentioned RFID stuff. You cannot have 'ultra-low power' and have a transmitter powerful enough on a WLAN.
I'm not sure what you mean. This thing is not a transmitter, it piggybacks on existing waves by modulating their reflections - that's the whole point of the paper. It won't have to compete with a WLAN.
Presumably range can be increased, specially if the principle is adapted to use that WLAN's 2.4ghz stronger signal instead of VHF.
If you could just stick a rice-sized sensor wherever you want and not worry about battery life we'd all have 'smart houses' by now.