The promise of NFC is about easily using mobile phones as a part of daily life: ticketing, paying with a credit card, opening doors, sharing, printing and downloading in the physical world. But until NFC technology is widely adopted, are there opportunities for using some of the features of RFID-interactions without the integration into the handset?

In South Korea we noticed a strong trend towards using mobile phone straps as electronic money, specifically using T-Money services to pay on public transport and to make small purchases at shops.

Almost all mobile phones offer some way of attaching straps. This is particularly important in Asia but from personal experience it is also becoming widespread everywhere. T-money is building upon this affordance and getting people to integrate the ticketing system into their daily use of the phone, as well as making a personal or even customised statement. In many ways attaching a travel card or credit card to a mobile phone makes a lot of sense: a mobile phone is part of essential daily activity that forms a key part of the three mobile essentials — the phone, keys and wallet — this is a form of casual, bottom-up convergence that works in practice.

The Octopus card in Hong Kong has gone slightly further in the RFID/mobile integration; offering Octopus Xpress-on covers for Nokia phones that are available alongside other payment products like watches and key chains:

“An Xpress-on cover that transforms the Nokia 3310 and 3330 mobile phones into an Octopus. The specially-designed cover comprises a full-function adult Octopus with no initial stored value or deposit. Customers can use the payment function after adding value to the Octopus in retail outlets or the Customer Service Centres at MTR or KCR Light Rail Stations.”

Two recent projects have shown the value of retro-fitting any mobile phone with RFID tags. The first is Slippery Rock University that is giving RFID tags to students to attach to their mobile phones as a mode of payment:

“The University’s 8,500 students and faculty members will each receive a passive 13.56 MHz RFID tag they can attach to their cell phones. This tag will allow them to pay for everything from laundry and copier services to movies and groceries in the surrounding town of Slippery Rock [...] “In the focus-group research, we found that students considered their cell phone a device they would always have with them, and which they expected greater use from,” Smith says. “Originally, we thought of embedding the tags in the phone, but decided to give the plastic card [the existing ID card with mag-strip and photo] and a separate chip with the intent to attach to the phone.””

More on the story here and here.

The second recent project is called Shifd which uses a mobile phone with an attached RFID to integrate some of the experiences of web-browsing with the mobile phone. “The goal of Shifd is to create a seamless transition between your computer and your mobile phone… and back again.” It uses SMS as the medium for transferring data, and the RFID tag/reader combination as a way of detecting the presence of the mobile phone and the computer. It sets up the mobile phone for accessing content when away from the PC, with RSS feeds, notes, maps, addresses and other content you have selected on the PC (a bit like Widsets).

This project has clearly discovered the compelling aspect of RFID interactions: the ability to set presence, context or state through the action of touch. The services at the moment take some of the basic content types from the PC (with a lovely web interface) and make them usable on the mobile phone; the RFID interaction simply helps in this overall experience.

The first downside of using simple RFID tags as opposed to NFC is that the phone is not an RFID reader. This means there is no opportunity to read passive tags embedded in things or to create phone-to-phone connections. This also means that there is no direct interface between the phone and the tag with no opportunity for any ‘mobile wallet’ or banking applications that have screen interfaces.

But given that this is an easy hack and an inexpensive way to create new kinds of interactions, there might be a lot more of this kind of convergence. Our only advice at the moment would be to use high frequency Mifare compatible tags so that an easy transition to NFC doesn’t get ruled out in the future.

All of the Touch design briefs we have been using this spring in the Touch course are now online, have a look.

The Touch course has also just finished, there will be case studies of the student work here sometime over the summer.

I revisited the Near Field Communication at Wikipedia page this week. For a long time it was a copy and paste of the About NFC page from the NFC Forum, but now it has evolved into a page of its own:

However it is still in a pretty sorry state, a mixture of history, standards, soapboxing and technical jargon. I know many people involved in the history and current development of NFC read this weblog, so this is my appeal to get involved making this a useful resource for a wider audience (I still don’t have a definitive page to send the uninitiated if they want to find out what NFC is). See the pages on the Hong Kong Octopus Card for an example of a good article.

So far I have added an image, cleaned up some irrelevant smart card links from the references and added an initial list of NFC trials. There is an awful lot more to be done before it becomes useful.

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

RFID has the potential to enable new kinds of playful interactions in toys and consumer electronics. There are three features that make this interesting: passive RFID tags don’t require batteries, offer wireless communication and a scheme for identifying physical objects.

The lack of batteries or serviceable parts allows the use of natural materials and uninterrupted surfaces; almost any object can become part of a gaming experience (excluding metal and water in most cases).

The short-range wireless properties allow action at a distance; when objects are brought near to each other, things happen! If this is combined with natural materials there is the potential to create experiences akin to magic.

Of course the fundamental feature of RFID is enabling the consistent identification of physical objects or users/players. In this context it allows game objects with memory or for users with a consistent identity within a game space.

When combined, these features seem to offer an almost unique opportunity. How can we take these opportunities and make games, toys or playful products?

This project should work towards making immediate, simple, ‘magic’ toys, games or playful consumer electronics. Taking these various opportunities afforded by RFID it should experiment with natural materials, game structures that require unique ID’s for either game objects or players and gameplay that relies on physical objects. It should focus more on the physical end of gameplay but could also consider interfaces for screen-based experiences.

The project should create demonstrable prototypes at various levels. Simple techniques such as sketching and model-making should result in a body of visual and physical work, followed by simple experiments using RFID readers and tags. Game interaction methods should be tested out by using outsized or table-based interfaces before attempting to make 1:1 scale products.

Initial prototypes should use self-contained low frequency RFID readers and transponders (Phidgets or ID12s) but keep in mind that NFC mobile phones might also fit into this product mix at some point in the future, with the ability to download settings, upgrades, power-ups or new behaviour from the internet via the phone for instance.

References

Brio Network. “A railway system based on the metaphor for the construction of a computer. The Network-world consists of ordinary wooden railway tracks and funky, small characters that live inside your computer.”

Nabaztag/tag / Video demo “Through this first iconic object, we are exploring the “Internet of things,” or life after the PC-centric world. Our mission is to invent new objects that enable technologies, services and experiences to make the real world in which we live more intelligent, interactive, ambient, networked, rich, emotional, personalized, smart and fun.”

Mattel Hyperscan review “Toward the end of our testing period, my friend Cameron wanted to play computer-based fighting games instead. As for me, I was ready to go read a book.”

Treat your sick doll with rfid. “According to symptoms, kids must use one of the items including “syringe,” “candy” and “medicine.” The doll reads RFID tags embedded in these items and responds accordingly.”

Little Tikes MagiCook Kitchen “Comes with pretend food embedded with electronic tags (RFID) that can be read by sensors on the stovetop which then respond with the appropriate comment.”

3C products. “The confluence of social software and physical computing, as a way of making products that exist in our sensory worlds, and can therefore be part of our social experience of the environment (think activities like giving and hiding, and abilities such as peripheral vision). I’d point at both Availabot and Jaiku here.”

RFID toys. “Contains step by step guides to building various RFID based projects, and stresses the concepts involved as well as the steps themselves.”

The coming age of magic “What’s interesting about how animism relates to ubicomp is not that it literally represents people’s relationship to embedded information processing, but that it may represent at a gut level how people relate to all objects that exhibit behaviors which go beyond basic action-reaction physics.” See also presentation here.

Adam Greenfield on animism Some thoughts on animism and magic in interaction design (read also the comments here )

See also references in the Connected products brief.

Read more about these design briefs.

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

RFID may begin to enable cheap – even disposable – products that have identities and connections to a network. What are the opportunities for integrating services, infrastructure, community and online brands into physical objects?

In the longer-term, how does the economics, form and function of physical products change when every product is a service or touchpoint? What might we call this new class of service-object?

What role might the mobile phone play in this infrastructure? Future products that are too cheap, simple or small to offer screens or buttons might use the NFC mobile phone as a rich interface and a network connection. This may enable a class of devices that don’t have input or output themselves, but still offer rich interactions or interfaces.

This project should investigate the early opportunities of having identities and interactions in cheap and ubiquitous physical products.

References

Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling. “The future will see a new kind of object – we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable – that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable.”

Space, Place and Things, New Rules of Tenancy within the Internet of Things. :I am trying to create what I think is an important connect-the-dots game between Internet of Things euphoria, Internet of Things dystopia and a pragmatic set of “design patterns” so that this stuff becomes legible to the “doers”.”

Neopets. Virtual pets with physical counterparts, see also Digital pets.

Build a bear. “Every Build-A-Bear Workshop® furry friend you make is stuffed with a barcode.”

Barcode Battler. “The game used barcodes to create a character for the player to use. Not all barcodes worked as players, instead some represented enemies or powerups. As well as the barcodes provided with the game itself, players were encouraged to find their own barcodes from everyday products.” See also Barcode games

Skannerz. “a series of electronic toys made by Radica Games that use barcode technology to create an interactive battle game that resembles Digimon.”

Hyperscan. “At least initially, HyperScan can fairly be described as a cross between trading card games (TCGs) and video games. It’s the first game system to use RFID technology.”

Talsmann: Using products to introduce cross-country skiing as a spare time activity in China. RFID-enabled products to introduce online information and community.

Read more about these design briefs.

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

It is likely that NFC has a role to play in the future of our interactions with infrastructures like payment, ticketing and access. But it is clear that mobile phones offer a different interface and experience to cash, cards, wallets and keys. So how should transactions be designed to take advantage of the change in interface?

One of the apparent changes is in the speed of transaction: the ability to simply touch a payment terminal with a mobile phone. There is also the ability to enter a pin number on one’s own device instead of using a terminal. With the ability to change the security level to suit individual requirements (or paranoia) this should allow payment interactions to work more efficiently and to be more secure. This is the advantage that has interested payments companies; the ability to process more customers.

But the simple assumption that increased efficiency makes an attractive new service has started to be questioned (see references). What kinds of interfaces would be ideal for transactions and how might they be implemented on the mobile phone? How might we add valuable new interactions, services or information into the transaction process that makes it more useful than simple payments?

Might there be other significant downsides as we expose our phone for every transaction? What about keeping a phone concealed for safety or the perceived risk of disclosing personal data by touching un-trusted objects?

In this project we would like you to study these emerging interactions around daily infrastructures. The project could start by studying the extensive marketing material on the proposed benefits of NFC from the mobile and payments industry. This study could form the basis of prototypes and scenarios that can be tested and evaluated by potential users. Another approach would be to design ideal ‘payment or ticketing objects’ for specific services, and to compare idealised designs with current implementations.

Of particular interest is the issue of control and visibility: the ability to control when and to whom one is transacting with; to see a history of transactions and to be able to act on that history.

References

Chau, P. Y. and Poon, S. 2003. Octopus: an e-cash payment system success story. Commun. ACM 46, 9 (Sep. 2003), 129-133. Link

Benjamin Lim, Heejin Lee and Sherah Kurnia. Why did an Electronic Payment System Fail? A Case Study from the System Provider’s Perspective. “The findings confirm the influence of EPS adoption factors identified from the literature, which include cooperation with established entities, simplicity, trust, security and mutuality of stakeholder benefits.” PDF

NFC mobile payments fail to inspire. “Rules adopted by the payment card organizations allowing U.S. consumers to make low-value purchases without signing receipts, tapping cards or other tokens to pay is not appreciably faster or more convenient than swiping the cards at the point of sale.”

Suica. “A rechargeable contactless smart card used as a fare card on train lines in Japan.”

Octopus card. “A rechargeable contactless stored value smart card used to transfer electronic payments in online or offline systems in Hong Kong.”

Mobile eCash’ could change the face of commerce “Cash or plastic? From starting with seashells, gold coins, and rewarding soldiers with salt, payment systems have evolved to keep lowering the cost of making each transaction, and separating the real item of value from the point of the transaction.”

Touchable services project: Place and product-based collaborative filtering.

See also Recent NFC news and links.

Read more about these design briefs.

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

One of the most important features of NFC is that it only works at a very short range. This ties our interactions to particular places or objects, and forces us to design applications or services that work on a local level. With internet development we have become accustomed to designing applications that service a global, disembodied set of users. The return to the local that is suggested by NFC technology is a very interesting challenge and potentially disruptive to design practice.

What information, applications and services can be usefully tied to specific places or situations?

If a service can reliably know that a user has been in a certain place, what does that information enable? What is the value of being physically present for an interaction to take place? What services are specific to the home, to the office, to public or private transport, to a specific public space or to a particular shop?

This project should consider detailed interactions between the mobile phone, services and local contexts. The project should use field studies and scenario design processes to explore services in the context of everyday objects and places. How might existing signage, advertising and urban interfaces be complemented with local interactions?

References

Attention Please!. “To explore the notion of presence, aura, and attention there is a very creative angle to be explored; “how can something attract attention?” As we are also using fixed capability RFID technology”

NFC presence. “Now I can just touch one of these tags with my phone, and a few seconds later (some delays are involved with starting the Java midlet and connecting to GPRS) the little box on the right changes to show my location. Voila: NFC-powered presence.”

Location-based service. An area full of interaction design clichés: “One example of a location-based service might be to allow the subscriber to find the nearest business of a certain type, such as an Italian restaurant.”

NFC completes Smart Posters standard. “Smart Posters are much more important to the NFC than a mechanism for giving away a few tones or setting up networking. Smart Posters have been promoted as the mechanism by which network operators can make money out of NFC.”

Touchable services, local interactions. “Students looked at how to increase the cohesion of local communities. As a starting point they studied a local record shop and looked at the intricate social and economic relationships around it.”

Annotate space by Andrea Moed. “A project to develop experiential forms of journalism and nonfiction storytelling for use at specific locations. Stories are presented through text, images and audio files that participants can download from the Web to their handheld computers and take with them to the place of interest.” Link and PDF

A list of Spatial annotation projects at elasticspace.

Redström, J., Dahlberg, P., Ljungstrand, P., and Holmquist, L.E. (1999), Designing for Local Interaction, In Proceedings of MANSE ‘99, Springer Verlag. “Much development of information technology has been about reducing the importance of distances and user location. Still, many important activities and events are of local nature, for instance serendipitous face-to-face communication. In order to support such communication, as well as other examples of local interaction, we have developed three prototypes all based on wireless short-range communication.” Link and PDF

Read more about these design briefs.

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

The landscape of RFID technology is focused on surveillance, efficiency and control. The near-future possibility of RFID implants, identity cards and passports is focused on the ability to efficiently and accurately identify people. The rush to replace barcodes with RFID is pushed by a desire to have more control and efficiency in supply chains and to reduce the risk of counterfeiting. Much of which ignores the human perspective and the imposition of this new technology is running into trouble as it begins to cross paths with public opinion, perception and protest.

But new infrastructures can certainly be designed to support useful, private, secure, bottom-up, ad-hoc and people-to-people interactions, not just transactions controlled by banks, transport systems and governments. There are open identity systems that should allow RFID to be used in a way that gains people’s trust, that allows individual control over its use.

This project should look at the issue of trust and technological innovation and adoption. It should take RFID or NFC as a case study and look at the various viewpoints that are taking control of the emerging debate. Without going into technical solutions the project could look at people-based or social scenarios around sharing, trust, privacy and perceived security in various defined contexts.

References

Rob van Kranenburg at How I learned to love RFID. “It is naive to say that RFID tags do not contain information, and thus cannot be linked to individuals: that disregards the whole history of data mining. Transparency is important, individuals should certainly have access to the information that their tags carry. This view has been fuelled by the Nokia phone that reads and writes tags.”

Matt Ward, Rob van Kranenburg, Gaynor Backhouse. RFID: Frequency, standards, adoption and innovation. PDF

Why Technical Breakthroughs Fail: A History of Public Concern with Emerging Technologies. “In the face of various public concerns, some of these technical breakthroughs have been successful while many others have been unsuccessful. This white paper examines five cases of technical launches that have taken place during the last fifteen years.”

Public Policy: Understanding Public Opinion. “As the Centre prepares to launch its EPC network it is therefore important to anticipate how the public will perceive this new technology, to anticipate any concerns and to explore ways in which the network can be improved, in order to ensure consumer’s confidence.”

Spychips: how RFID will compromise privacy, security, freedom

Privacy-Enhancing Radio Frequency Identification Tag: Implementation of the Clipped Tag. “The privacy-protecting tag, called the “Clipped Tag” has been suggested by IBM as an additional consumer privacy mechanism. The clipped tag puts the option of privacy protection in the hands of the consumer. It provides a visible means of enhancing privacy protection by allowing the transformation of a long-range tag into a proximity tag that still may be read, but only at short range – less than a few inches or centimeters. This enables later use of the tag for returns or recalls.” PDF

Smart and Secure RFID tags “The philosophy of the RFIDsec tag is that all users can read and access the part of the tags information that is authorised for their specific use, and nothing else. Strong encryption, even on passive tags, ensures that the levels of access are not jeopardised. The Access Management software ensures simple and secure user control. Hence it is possible to have data on tag. The RFIDsec tag can even operate in Silent Mode, thus eliminating concerns about leaking information and consumer privacy.” Link

See also references for RFID and the everyday

Read more about these design briefs.