Touch » Mobile

iPhone RFID and NFC peripherals

Timo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:48:08 +0000

We are beginning to see RFID and NFC peripherals beginning to be released for the iPhone. Since our conceptual video prototype of the iPhone object-based media came out in April, we’ve had thousands of emails requesting details about such a peripheral. Here is the first, the iCarte.

“The iCarteTM is a Near Field Communication (NFC) / Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Reader, designed to provide NFC two-way communication, RFID read/write and contactless payment capability for the iPhone. NFC and RFID tag information can be written and read by the iCarteTM and communicated to the iPhone or to any Computer with a USB port. iCarteTM has an embedded smart-chip that can be configured as debit, credit, pre-paid and loyalty cards, for secure contactless transactions. iCarteTM can also read NFC Smart Posters, download or upload electronic coupons, tickets or receipts. iCarteTM is ideal for iPhone users who want to use their iPhones for fast and secure contactless payments, transit payments, loyalty rewards, checking balances, top-up, discovering new services from smart posters or kiosks and exchanging information with other NFC phones. Business iPhone users can use the iCarteTM for commercial applications such as asset tracking, document tracking, healthcare, security and access control.”

I’ve also heard rumours that Core RFID is about to have a reader available for the iPhone, and we’ll flag that up here as soon as we hear anything more.

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iPhone RFID: object-based media

Timo — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:54:11 +0000

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 range of a wireless tag embedded inside a physical object.

RFID is becoming more common in mobile phones (under the term Near Field Communication or NFC) from manufacturers such as Nokia. By looking at Apple’s patents we know that the technology is being considered for the iPhone. With the iPhone SDK 3.0 external hardware accessories can be accessed by iPhone software, so third party RFID or NFC readers are also possible.

So what kinds of applications would emerge if an iPhone had an NFC reader? Here we have prototyped a simple media player, which triggers the playback of content on the touch of a tag, and created a set of augmented objects that have relationships to different kinds of audiovisual content.

A lens for media

Compared to other mobile handsets the iPhone is a particularly media-friendly device, with a large, bright screen and high quality audiovisual playback. What if this screen could act as a ‘lens’ to content that resides in the world?

In a screen-based interface content may be buried many levels deep inside an information architecture. But in a physical RFID-driven interface a simple gesture can offer quick and direct access to content. Physical objects afford tangible manipulation that screens cannot, and this is great for playful products. Our Bowl prototype showed a natural blending of media consumption and playful activitiy in children, where media viewing became less passive and a more active experience.

Durrell Bishop has discussed these ideas in a more general way, what if objects were augmented with new properties, that can be perceived through an iPhone lens?

Media objects

In this video demo, the objects have been chosen to physically or visually represent the content. There are some obvious relationships, such as the Moomin figure leading to a favourite episode of a Moomin animation. The less obvious relationships such as the wooden house leading to home videos were chosen because they just somehow felt right. In fact the exact relationship may be of secondary importance, as over time the behaviour of the physical and digital objects becomes known and transparent through exploration and repetition.

Some of the objects felt particularly satisfying. The Make Podcast object for instance—where touching the ‘geek’ plays the latest ‘Weekend project’— shows how an object can be used for exploring a dynamic stream of content.

Going further

This video prototype is basic and intended to open up for discussion and new exploration around the experience of media selection through physical objects. At the moment the interaction is a trigger, but what if the phone doesn’t just react as output but also as input to physical objects? How do we programme and manage our sets of media and applications in these objects?

Overall this points towards opportunities around the distribution of media through physical objects, it is an example of general ideas around an ‘internet of things’ or ‘spimes’ applied to the world of media. What opportunities would the distribution of RFID-embedded products open up in terms of media, gaming, services and marketing? What does this mean for the future of products?

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Wireless in the world

Timo — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:59:49 +0000

An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies visible, in order to better understand and communicate with and about them (see a Graphic Language for RFID, Dashed lines and Fictional radio spaces).

Right now I am sitting near fourteen objects sending and receiving radio signals, from Oyster cards to mobile phones and wireless routers in a multitude of overlapping and competing fields. Here we are creating communicative material that uses dashed-line abstractions to visualise the presence of wireless technologies in the everyday environment. What if we could see every field produced by an Oyster card or NFC enabled mobile phone for instance?

Using simple abstractions such as the dashed line and the kinds of visual language that we have previously proposed for RFID allow us to quickly communicate aspects such as the spatial properties of wireless technologies that are often overlooked. I’ve been using these images in presentations for a while, to sensitise designers and students to the spatial and embodied properties of RFID, Bluetooth and WIFI.

We are also experimenting with video, where the visualisations are part of an environment in a moving sequence. This is looking like a useful technique for making visual explanations of invisible materials.

Here are more images:

NFC phones and contactless cards.

NFC phones.

Wifi and bluetooth.

An NFC-enabled bus timetable.

An NFC-enabled ‘smart poster’.

An Oyster card reader and cards

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Lightweight, parasitic services

Timo — Mon, 26 May 2008 13:31:34 +0000

Touch and travel is a German pilot scheme (one of many) that is testing NFC for ticketing on public transport. One of the partners in the trial Giesecke and Devrient describe it:

“With the new eTicketing System Touch&Travel from Deutsche Bahn (DB), the mobile phone serves as an electronic ticket on trains, buses, streetcars, subways, etc. The SIM cards inside the phones are provided by Giesecke & Devrient. The Touch&Travel project is initiated by Deutsche Bahn, the German railway, and the mobile operator Vodafone.”

This trial shows one of the ways that NFC changes the infrastructure required for a ticketing or payment service. In this case it is a lightweight, parasitic infrastructure that can fairly cheaply be added to other ticketing methods. The service relies on three elements:

Passive NFC tags at stations that contain a unique identifier or geographic information for that location. In this case they are embedded inside what must be a cheap container of aluminium, a printed surface and glass. This doesn’t require power or a network connection, and serves the same function as a large, powered, and networked ticket machine.
The mobile phone is the window into the service; it interprets the location/identification data, connects to the ‘cloud’ and provides an interface. This interface could show location, ticket prices, ticket options, time of journey, routes, transaction history, etc. Here there is the opportunity to create a service that offers more utility, value and experience than traditional ticketing.

The mobile data network connects the user to the service, in many cases this data connection already exists, and doesn’t require infrastructural development. Of course here there are issues with underground metro systems that don’t offer mobile coverage.

More details on the service/interaction design:
By waving your NFC mobile handset over the so called Touchpoint before entering the train, located at the platforms, the system registers the beginning of a trip.
The ticket is stored on the SIM card inside the mobile phone
The conductor checks the ticket by scanning the phone with a portable reader.
Having arrived at the destination, the handset is waved over the Touchpoint again. The system registers the end of your trip. The system processes the data and calculates the correct cost for the distance traveled.

The passenger is billed once a month
Of course the service requires that NFC handsets are easily available, or that the service is sold through SIM add-ons for existing mobiles (perhaps as an alternative to a contactless card like Oyster/Suica).

I wonder how a service that relies so heavily on an ad-hoc infrastructure will be accountable to failure and who holds responsibility and the problem-solving ability for errors and misunderstandings?

Thinking also about the parasitic; might multiple services compete with each other for approachable station space? In a de-regulated environment (I’m thinking of the UK here) who you touch might define what service you get…
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Three papers on mobile payments

Timo — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:06:55 +0000

The weblog ‘Putting people first’ links to three interesting papers from CHI 2008 on mobile payments.

From meiwaku to tokushita!

Lessons for digital money design from Japan. Mainwaring, S., March, W., and Maurer, B. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

“As an example of ubiquitous computing in the here and now, the adoption of digital money is found to be messy and contingent, shot through with cultural and social factors that do not hinder this adoption but rather constitute its specific character. Adoption is strongly tied to Japanese conceptions of the aesthetic and moral virtue of smooth flow and avoidance of commotion, as well as the excitement at winning something for nothing.”

Reminds me of Bell & Dourish’s Yesterday’s tomorrows where ubicomp is ‘highly present, visible, and branded’.

Human-Currency Interaction

Learning from virtual currency use in China. Wang, Y. and Mainwaring, S. D. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [PDF]

“Virtual and real currencies can interact in complex ways that promote, extend, and/or interfere with the value and character of game worlds. Bringing money into HCI design heightens existing issues of realness, trust, and fairness, and thus presents new challenges and opportunities for user experience innovation.”

I like the way that money as a constraint within HCI research is seen as a way of strengthening research around realness and trust.

Ubipay

Conducting everyday payments with minimum user involvement. Lehdonvirta, V., Soma, H., Ito, H., Kimura, H., and Nakajima, T. 2008. In CHI ‘08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [PDF]

“The aim is to make paying like breathing: something we are only peripherally aware of unless we exert our resources beyond the usual. This idea has powerful implications for business and design.”

Wow, towards true frictionless capitalism.

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Future (NFC) phone is talk of festival!

Timo — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:39:04 +0000

The Green Touch installation at DOTT07 in Newcastle that we created with Helsinki-based Thinglink was a great success. There are a few photos of the event from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. The local newspaper Evening Chronicle wrote a story on the exhibition:

Expect a write-up of the experience soon.

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Touchable services: Art Server

Timo — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:15:46 +0000

In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO conducted intense one-week investigations into Near Field Communication in a project called Touchable services. See more student projects.

Anna Daniell, Castilnano Simoons, Stig Skjelvik and Christopher Svendsen looked at new commercial models for artists and galleries, and the social sharing or artwork.

Stig Skjelvik explains:

‘For most people art is expensive. You have only the possibility to look at it in a gallery, buy a poster, or find a picture on the internet. But what if we can make a system that makes it possible to se the art, and then send it home, or even more interesting, to send it to a friend, loved ones or family.’

In their prototype, the students placed RFIDs alongside artefacts at a gallery. When touched with an NFC phone, an image of the artwork was sent to a digital picture frame in another place.

The prototype was very simple and loaded URLs from the phone that prompted changes on a standard web-page. This was just enough to test out the interactions between users at the gallery and in the home context, which proved to be interesting and engaging. The system reinforced a strong connection between the two users, and the appearance of new images created the sense of a ‘gift’.

This project is particularly interesting in its realisation: all the elements of the service were prototyped, from the gallery interface through the web server application through to the industrial design of a digital LCD frame. Quickly prototyping all elements of the system in this way allowed them to test the service in context: in a gallery and in the home. This allowed the students to really get a handle on the experiential side of the prototypes.

Artwork by Anna Daniell. More detail at Stig’s weblog.

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Touchable services: Underskog

Timo — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:43:55 +0000

Anette Andersen and Jørn Knutsen worked with the web service Underskog (the undergrowth). Underskog is infamous in Norway as one of the first social networking services, it offers event calendaring, collaborative weblogs, discussions and is invite only. It is shining example of situated software.

In their analysis, the students listed the strengths and weaknesses of the online service. Underskog is really good at handling the time before an event. It answers many of the questions that arise: Is anyone I know planning going? What does it cost? What do other people think of the place? Where do I get tickets? Where exactly is it? What kind of people are coming? I want to let other people know I’m going.

What Underskog currently is not good at is the time during an event: Are any of my friends here? Where are all my friends? He should be here by now? I’m bored, what else is going on? I want to let my friends know I’m here.

They designed a simple system that would log users into venues by touching a tag in the venue. Users would then rate events by touching a happy or sad face. The use of RFID-tags placed around arenas and events would allow for very quick ‘swipes’ or ‘touches’ to indicate presence and ratings, this is particularly important in a context where interacting with a screen may be socially inappropriate.

Through the use of scenarios the students demonstrated the usage of such a system. The mobile interface told you how many of your contacts were there, and also if your contacts were somewhere else. It also sent information back to Underskog.no where information would appear on a map.

Being a one week project, they did not look into detail what the advantages of this system may be over other forms of communication like SMS or simple mobile internet. But what is particularly interesting about this service is that the RFID tags can be placed by anybody on any venue, becoming a parasite of existing infrastructures much like Underskog itself. The service is potentially totally user-driven, and doesn’t require venues to sign up to the service in order for it to be useful.

See more at Jørn’s weblog.

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NFC in action

Timo — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:00:50 +0000

A video has surfaced from the recent launch of the Nokia 6131 NFC phone at CES. The demo shows some basic functions of touch-based interactions such as using a ‘smart poster’ to make a phone call, uploading pictures to a picture frame, printing out from the gallery and paying at a contactless Visa till.

It is instantly clear that the interaction with the device has been much improved since Nokia’s previous NFC attempts. As the NFC interactions are now a core part of the operating system the response is very quick, and the range of functions is becoming appealing. The comments on both YouTube and Gizmodo are unusually positive.

Using a ‘flip’ form for an NFC device is very clever, as it allows the RFID reader to be at the top of the device when opened: the most natural placement for people to use the phone as a physical ‘pointer’. In previous NFC ‘candybar’ phones, the RFID reader has been placed underneath, to separate it from the multiple other antennae at the top of the phone, and this has been confusing for users.

Meanwhile in Japan KDDI unveils ten new devices almost all of which include FeliCa. Lets hope there is some compatibility between NFC and FeliCa in the near future.

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Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset

Timo — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:49:33 +0000

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 via add-on covers, both of which did not support the latest NFC standards and had limited capabilities. The new handset will be available in select markets in the 1st quarter of 2007.

Nokia’s press release:

“Unlike a simple card or keytag, which only allows for one-way communication, an NFC-enabled mobile phone allows users to realize the benefits of a fully interactive experience. For example, touching an NFC-enabled advertising poster or informational kiosk can automatically link the user to interactive Internet based information, open an audio file, or download new content directly to the handset. Additionally, an extra layer of security is enabled when making contactless payments since the handset can be set to allow payment information only when the user expressly authorizes the transaction via a password, unlike a card or tag, which can be used by whoever has it in their possession.”

“Along with its NFC features, the Nokia 6131 NFC phone includes an extensive set of today’s most wanted wireless features. A built-in digital music player with microSD card support and FM stereo radio allow customers to enjoy their favorite music on the go. A 1.3 megapixel camera, featuring a dedicated camera button and 8x digital zoom makes it easy to capture and share images. Bluetooth wireless technology enables easy connection to a wide selection of Nokia enhancements and PC’s or even the ability to go handsfree in compatible automobiles.”

It’s a simple Series 40 phone, not a high-end smartphone, but these features add up to a respectable and hopefully cheap device. It supports Java MIDP 2.0, Bluetooth and EDGE, all of which should make application development with NFC that much easier.

Now the big question is the rollout of NFC services. NFC technology offers very little without a supporting infrastructure of regionally specific ticketing, payment and custom services. Will we see London Transport selling Oyster phones, or Tesco selling loyalty phones? Without services/applications like these, the handsets themselves are likely to be hard to sell.

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Touchable services: local interactions

Timo — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:44:06 +0000

Einar Sneve Martinussen, André Borgen, Paolo Dell’elce and Henrik Marstrander 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.

They discovered an existing layer of printed, handwritten, and scrawled information in and around the record shop itself. This was a mixture of content, relying very much on local knowledge and social connections including recent arrivals, staff picks, recommendations and playlists, all of which offered rich opportunities for interaction design. They also discovered intruiging patterns and behaviours, including eccentric opening times that inspired them to look at what happened around the shop during closed periods.

They prototyped a simple application that offered the ability to hear and download music, playlists, new releases, etc. by touching the phone to the shop window, and conceptualised how this might be applied in other areas of the shop.

See more at Henrik’s weblog with their presentation of technologies, wider ideas and research.

This project was very interesting in the amount of ideas that emerged from a single context. It seems that when you begin to research a specific situation, the applications and services that emerge from it are numerous. The students here conducted a kind of situation-based brainstorming that was very rich. Situation and context provide very useful limits for for idea-generation. It also showed that NFC has numerous opportunities in niche communities, in contrast to typical location based services that offer generalised applications to tourists, etc.

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Phantom geometry and tissue-simulant liquids

Timo — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:20:14 +0000

I’m investigating the visualisation of electromagnetic fields, part of our exploratory process to look at the materiality of RFID. What are we talking about when we say ‘touch-based interaction’ or ‘near field’ for instance? This investigation threw up an interesting company: Indexsar specialises in:

“Turnkey test systems for the measurement of SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) and the Over The Air (OTE) testing of wireless devices. Our product range includes E-field probes for use in both air and in tissue-simulant liquids, equipment for accurate testing of the dielectric properties of phantom liquids and a system to give a 3-Dimensional presentation of mobile handset radiation and sensitivity. We can supply suitable RF amplifiers and directional couplers for wireless product testing and can offer suitable phantoms (heads, hands and liquids) for testing radiated emissions.”

Their test setup includes 6-axis industrial robots to move sensors around models of human anatomy (or “phantom geometry” in official testing language). Their setups include geometry for the head, and the right hand (no left hands yet). In the test rig below a liquid model moves while the sensors are stationary. It looks like it has been hacked together from meccano and a Wacom pad.

These are some visualisations of bodily electromagnetic fields from Flomerics MicroStripes and Hugo:

Microstripes software is a 3D electromagnetic simulation & synthesis tool:

“MicroStripes is widely used to design antenna and microwave structures and assess their installed performance, to optimize RFID systems, to analyze radar cross-section (RCS), EMI/EMP and lightning effects on vehicles, ships and aircraft, and to predict absorption of EM fields in human tissue.”

Another visualisation:

Leafing through the manual for my Nokia E60 I noticed that it includes guidelines on holding the phone, in order not to degrade the performance, and thus battery life of the antennae.

As we move towards multiradio devices, this analysis is going to become more important. I wonder what the fields look like around the RFID/NFC phones like the 3220...

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Developing NFC applications

Timo — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:18:46 +0000

Judging by the number of emails we have received, there is great interest in software and hardware development of NFC applications. The main stumbling block at the moment seems to be working out what development platform to use, and knowing where to get hold of development kits for the various handsets and servers needed to run an NFC application.

Bearing in mind that we haven’t used any of these things extensively yet, we are putting everything we know about getting hold of development resources here. Perhaps we can collectively use this post as a way of pooling information on the topic. Thanks to Peter Ljungstrand for initial conversations and valuable information on these things.

NFC phones

At the moment, the phones we can use for NFC development are the 5140 Field Force Solution and the 3220 NFC Shell. Both of these are rather quirky, the the 5140 is slow, and the NFC shell is somewhat unreliable. Nokia has admitted that these are trial releases for developers, and will never be widely released to the public.

Both of these kits are available from Top Tunniste, and we’ve seen them pop up at other online stores too, so search around.

Various rumours have been circulating about upcoming Nokia handsets: perhaps a flip phone with a fully integrated NFC chip, not just an interchangeable cover. We’ll have to wait and see but lets hope they have a robust and consistent approach to the next release, coupled with simultaneous rollouts of useful public services.

Samsung has apparently developed an NFC enabled SGH-X700. There is some discussion about it over at the Sun developer network.

In Asia, particularly Japan, many handsets are using the Felica standard that is supposedly compatible with NFC. It would be very interesting to hear any Asian experience with these phones or the Felica SDK.

NFC tags

The Nokia 3220 only comes with four tags, so any developer will need to get hold of more. Getting hold of tags is easy. Toptunniste for instance sells a few kinds of tags for about a euro each. But there are many other options: NFC is based upon high frequency ISO 14443 Mifare standard, so re-writeable Mifare Standard 1K/4K or Mifare Ultralight tags from any supplier should work. And these are available in many form factors, from cards, key fobs, stickers, to laundry tags and ‘mount on metal’ tags. Some other suppliers are Mannings, Promobox, Cardxx, SAG and Korea RFID.

NFC standards and protocols

The NFC forum is slowly releasing the specifications for NFC devices, and this is the first place to look if you want to find out if the NFC standard is right for your application. There is enough detail there to work on high-level descriptions of NFC applications and services.

‘Official’ development kits

At the moment, because the Near Field Communication specifications haven’t been normalised, writing an application for NFC requires writing for one brand of phone, using proprietary development kits.

The Nokia Field Force Solution Architecture, available here.

The Nokia development kit for NFC is currently available from a number of suppliers. Top Tunniste in Finland sells a 5 user license for €2000, they also sell phones and compatible tags if you can’t find them locally. I’ve heard that the kit is available for around €800 in Germany and £500 in the UK so it may be worth phoning around to ask local suppliers.

In the license agreement for the Nokia SDK you agree to use their proprietary server for networked interactions. For this you need to buy, or subscribe to the Nokia Local Interactions Server (LI Server). The LI server is described as such:

Nokia Local Interactions Server (LI Server) is a cost-efficient, real-time Web service that simplifies data capture, reporting, management, and communication with mobile workforce. Quickly integrated into your company’s back-end systems, your field force personnel can use it to provide up-to-date information to the back-end office and receive instant feedback in their mobile phones. It is also an easy, but secure method to distribute and update company-specific phone Local Interactions (LI) Client software to end-users’ mobile phones.

This is €400 from Top Tunniste. Getting around the LI server is supposed to be a little clumsy, but it’s possible (if not legal) to use your own server applications. At the simplest end of the spectrum, my students have used URI stored on tags as simple pointers to web applications that are invoked when a page is loaded, for instance.

If you want to discover how other people are getting on with this stuff, then try searching at Forum Nokia for RFID or NFC, which reveals threads like this one.

Other development kits

There are other hardware and software NFC development kits available from places like Sirit, Inside contactless, Skyetek, Innovision and Wireless Dynamics. Given that the NFC forum specifications are still nascent, we don’t yet trust the interoperability between different manufacturer’s devices. So we haven’t used any of these so far, and would be very interested in your experiences.

Contactless communication API

JSR 257 the “Contactless Communication API” has been proposed by Nokia and is currently being defined by the Java Mobile community. It is supported by the Nokia 5140i FFS (Source) but we’re not sure about the Samsung phones. When rolled out and standardised, it should be a good common development space for all kinds of applications that require physical links or applications. One of the great possibilities is that we can prototype and launch using 2D barcode tags, and easily transition to NFC interactions as the handsets become widely available. We can also design more specialist applications that use Bluetooth or even IR in the same environment.

Simon Woodside, the developer of Semacode, writes about it here:

JSR 257: Contactless Communication API is defining both RF and visual tag interface for Java ME. This will be THE way to interact with visual tags and RFIDs, smart cards, etc. And since our SDK implements the public draft interface, you can future proof yourself.

There is an overview of this and JSR 256, the “Mobile Sensor API” here, and an in-depth look at the standard here. It’s currently in the “Proposed Final Draft” stage so it looks like it’s pretty solidified.

More information

We are really interested in hearing about your experiences with development, it would be great to use this post as a place to collect information.

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Mobile Interaction with the Real World

Timo — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:21:22 +0000

My short position paper “A graphic language for touch-based interactions” has been accepted to the Mobile HCI 2006 workshop Mobile Interaction with the Real World. The workshop aims to

“develop an understanding of how mobile devices (particularly mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs) can be used as interaction devices. [...] we aim to develop new ideas on how mobile phones can be exploited for new forms of interaction with the environment.”

The other papers at the workshop look interesting:

Telling a Story on a Tag: The Importance of Markers’ Visual Design for Real World Applications, Enrico Costanza (MIT Media Lab, USA), Mirja Leinss (Harvard GSD, USA)
Mobile Pointing & Input System for Eye Glass Display, Youngjin Hong, Sanggoog Lee, Yongbeom Lee, Sangryong Kim (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, South Korea)
User Perceptions on Mobile Interaction with Visual and RFID Tags, Sara Belt (University of Oulu, Finland), Dan Greenblatt, Jonna Häkkilä (Nokia Multimedia, Finland), Kaj Mäkelä (Nokia Research Center, Finland)
Hovering: Visualising RFID Hyperlinks in a Mobile Phone, Pasi Välkkynen (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland)
The Mobile Phone as a Universal Interaction Device – Are There Limits?, Christof Roduner (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
Alternative RFID based Architectures for Mobile HCI with Physical Objects, Stefano Puglia (WLAB Ltd., Italy), Andrea Vitaletti (University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy)
Automatic Composition in Service Browsing Environments, Paul Wisner (Nokia Research Center, USA)
Constructing assemblies for purposeful interactions, Pollini Alessandro, Grönvall Erik (University of Siena, Italy)
Finding the Path from Here to There: Some Questions about Physical-Mobile Design Processes, Amnon Dekel (The Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel)
Understanding Real World Practices: a Place-Centred Study of Mobile Workers, Darragh Murphy, Iride Bartolucci, Luigina Ciolfi (University of Limerick, Ireland)
Public Display Advertising Based on Bluetooth Device Presence, Matthew Sharifi, Terry Payne, Esther David (University of Southampton, UK)

Exploiting incidental interactions between mobile devices, Jamie Lawrence, Terry Payne, Raul V. Kripalani (University of Southampton, UK)

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RFID in Seoul: first impressions

Timo — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 15:37:23 +0000

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 kind lady showed a mobile phone strap that contained a T Money card:

Within a few minutes I had a charged up T Money card and figured out the over-designed ticket gates. Quite good for a totally new system with new languages and currency.

Later, at a ‘Family Mart’, there was a hastily placed payment terminal that offered payment for mobile phones.

The touch indicator is very HAL-like, I imagine it glows softly red when a payment is made. More to investigate…

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Reboot 8: Mobile presence

Timo — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 16:25:12 +0000

The thing that struck me most at Reboot 8 was the emergence of the mobile as a platform. In particular, this platform is finally allowing the kinds of 3rd party and community development that we have been lacking for the last few years. The first signs of this are simple modifications to existing applications and in particular the addition of presence.

Jyri Engeström showed simple but effective interfaces for what he terms ‘social peripheral vision’, the ability to glance at information about a social circle and to gain an awareness of other’s plans in both space and time. Simple additions to the current phone interface (like the address book and calendar) can show a lot of contextual information. Jyri is working on Jaiku that is still under wraps, but talking with Mika Raento gave some clues as to what this might be. Mika has worked on interesting applications like ContextContacts at the University of Helsinki.

Marko Ahtisaari talked about the Seven Challenges to our Shared Mobile Future, and in particular the overall goal of reaching the next 2 billion mobile phone users. It’s clear that this future is not just about Nokia’s multimedia computers, but will also be about making simple voice and text experiences more beautiful and engaging.

Chris Heathcote presented a ‘manifesto’ for the mobile internet; design patterns and approaches for the internet on mobile devices. He demonstrated the new Mobile web server as a universal tool for things like presence. This brings with it interesting issues like serving data with a device that may be out of coverage or batteries.

Finally there was a quick demo of Plazes, and the new Plazes mobile client beta that looks very impressive. It uses cell ID to share user context, only when instructed to. Given that Plazes already has an active user-community its possible that this will be the first widely used mobile presence application.

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