RFID gestures

While thinking about radio-field-based interactions and the gestures that they entail I’m reminded of this quote by Adam in Everyware:

“If you really want to know what information processing dissolving in behaviour really looks like, catch the way women swing their handbags across the Octopus readers at the turnstiles of the Mong Kok subway station; there’s nothing in the slightest to suggest that this casual 0.3-second gesture is the site of intense technical intervention.”

Some of the most common RFID gestures that have truly become part of everyday life are in contactless ticketing. Here are some images I took in Seoul, South Korea:

RFID ticket interactions 2

RFID ticket interactions 1

RFID ticket interactions 3

Surprisingly, there is not a lot of work on the spatial or gestural aspects of radio-based interfaces. There is some work towards looking at the spatial aspects of camera-based interactions:

Reeves, S. et al., 2006. The spatial character of sensor technology. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Designing Interactive systems. University Park, PA, USA: ACM Press, pp. 31-40.

Related things:

  1. RFID in Seoul: first impressions I’m in Seoul, South Korea looking at the use of mobile technology and RFID. The first encounter with RFID came only an hour or so off the plane by the Metro ticketing machines, a......
  2. The RFID photo booth At last year’s Picnic conference we created a networked Photo Booth as part of the Mediamatic RFID hackers camp. Picnic is a conference with about two thousand attendees and multiple venues in the Westergasfabriek......
  3. iPhone RFID: object-based media This is a video prototype of an iPhone media player that uses physical objects to control media playback. It is based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) that triggers various iPhone interactions when in the......
  4. RFID in Seoul: High-end smartcards The contactless ticketing and payment system of choice in Seoul is called T-Money. Seoul was the first city to use Mifare standard smartcards in 1996. Although retail payment doesn’t seem to have taken off......
  5. Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated NFC handset that will (operators willing) be available to the public. Previously NFC had been confined to ageing handsets like the 5140 and 3220......

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3 Responses to RFID gestures

  1. Lex 19 June 2008 at 2:27 #

    It’s pretty funny that at our department building to see that almost everyone swing their butt ‘sexily’ to get access to every door using RFID…:-P

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Immaterials: the ghost in the field - 16 October 2009

    [...] know more about the way that RFID technology inhabits space so that we could better understand the kinds of interactions that can be built with it and the ways it can be used effectively and playfully inside physical [...]

  2. Touch: Immaterials: the ghost in the field - 17 October 2009

    [...] know more about the way that RFID technology inhabits space so that we could better understand the kinds of interactions that can be built with it and the ways it can be used effectively and playfully inside physical [...]

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