Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that on the surface looks like a fairly ordinary bluetooth-enabled, battery powered speaker system. 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 [...]

Hybrids: The social web in the physical world
The Touch project has a new exhibition in collaboration with the Record project at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design. In recent years we have witnessed the growth of a new breed of consumer products and services that are a hybrid of tangible atoms and online bits. This exhibition offers a selection of products, [...]

Skål: playing with media
Skål (Norwegian for bowl) is a product that has emerged from the Bowl project. It is a media player designed for the home that acts as the interface between physical objects and related digital media on a television. This video shows Skål in action. A bowl sits on the living room table and a range [...]

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 range of a wireless tag embedded inside a physical object. RFID is becoming more common in mobile phones (under the term [...]

Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2009
We recently presented our paper Designing with RFID at the Tangible and Embedded Interaction conference in Cambridge UK. This presentation was part of a session on ‘enabling technologies and design techniques’. The presentation focused on how we look at the physical aspects of RFID form through design. The full presentation is available on Slideshare and [...]

Playful augmented products
This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating. It extends an older brief Playful RFID with an emphasis on exploring material and experience prototyping. Last week Interaction Design students at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design participated in a Touch workshop where the brief was to design [...]
RFID and physical social networks
Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based objects that plug into a PC via USB (where have we heard that before?) A Poken is a connected business card, when you meet people you want to connect to, you touch their ‘poken’ and get added to their Open Social network. Just tap your [...]
RFID peripherals
Plug and play RFID-reading USB peripherals are all the rage, as indicated by a stream of recent product announcements. These readers plug into a PC and make various things happen when they are touched with an RFID tag. RFID readers are small and cheap, encapsulating them in packaging and offering a standard USB interface makes [...]
About
Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. We are developing applications and services that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. More...
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