The interesting bit is that this is the first appliance (that I can buy in a shop) that does things when touched with a mobile phone:

The NFC interaction is demonstrated first-hand with the newly announced NFC-enabled Nokia N9 in this Engadget video.

Nokia has been pushing NFC since 2004, but mainly towards ticketing, payment and ‘smart posters’. We’ve been pushing for more constrained, local and ad-hoc applications of NFC and it’ll be interesting to see if approach fares any better in the mass-market.

Related things:

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Sniff is first and foremost a high-quality physical toy dog, that can withstand the rough and tumble of everyday play and activities. But Sniff’s interactive elements add an extra dimension of experience and engagement. Through the use of Radio Frequency IDentification technology Sniff can identify objects that he comes close to, which trigger behaviours that are expressed through sound and vibration. In the Sniff video above you can see three of Sniff’s ‘activities’ in action, in real settings.

Sniff is designed as a companion in daily situations as well as in play and games, alone or together with other children, and including one or more Sniffs. Special attention has been devoted to the design of interaction between sound and vibration. Auditory feedback is important for the sociality of the toy, and makes it possible for a larger number of people to participate in play. Haptic feedback deepens the experience, support hands-on operation and creates a special bond between user and toy.

Sniff is a robust and fully working prototype that has been through several iterations it its physical design, interaction design and technology. This has happened as part of a long evaluation process where it has been tested with many kids and adults.

Book, website and paper

The Sniff website goes further into some of the design and conceptual issues, as well as background material and references.

Sara Johansson presented some of the background and research behind Sniff at The Interaction design and children conference in June 2009. Here is the paper that goes deeper into the design issues particularly issues of abstraction in character and interaction design.

Finally there is also a lovely book available to buy. The book is presented as a ‘day in the life of Sniff’ and details many of the interactive, playful concepts that have been designed.

Related things:

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(I’m a big fan of dotted or dashed lines, it’s a great visual trick for representing hidden things. Glad to see that Mike is taking up this language, we should develop it further!)

Here’s the description of the talk in full, the slides are available from slideshare and at Mike’s weblog:

Things have long had identifying marks, from silversmiths’ hallmarks to barcodes, but mating machine-readable identification with pervasive networking greatly increases the value of the marks.

For example, when a machine-readable identification method such as an RFID or a high-density visual code is combined with the wireless networking of a mobile phone, a new way of interacting with everyday objects is created. Once you have the capability uniquely identify anything immediately, you can attach meta information to it. Any meta-information. How much is this worth on eBay? Which of my friends has one? Will this go with my Mom’s china? Will it make me sick if I eat it? Was it made by children?

I call this digital representation as accessed through a unique ID, an object’s “information shadow” and I now see them attached to just about everything. Beyond getting meta information, however, lies an even more powerful concept: changing the physical object to a service, for which the thing you’re looking at is but a single instantiation of that agreement. It’s already happened to media, and to car-shared cars and shared bicycles in urban areas.

When this happens, the objects have to change at a fundamental level. They have to be designed differently and they have to be described and discussed differently. The “owner’s” relationship to the object changes. The very idea of ownership changes. The solid object grows a dotted line that is filled-in as-needed, when-needed, and with the features that are needed. This is not the same thing as renting or co-ownership, its anytime/anywhere nature-enabled by the underlying technology makes these new service objects fundamentally new.

Many recent products point in this direction, where objects such as the Amazon Kindle are useless without the service contract, where a Nabaztag/tag is an empty shell waiting for connection to a network full of personal information and social connections, and where NFC phones and RFID peripherals are just the touchpoints between the online and the offline.

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