In the recent “Conversation with Eric Schmidt” with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010, there is a good deal of discussion about the use of NFC in mobile devices. Right at the start of this video there is a demo of as-yet-unannounced Google device with an NFC ‘secure element’ chip, that interacts with a physical Google ‘placemark’.

While this demonstration is basic, and doesn’t actually go much further than what we are already used to with GPS and wifi positioning, it is quite exciting that a platform like Android might open up an open platform for physical-world interaction. I’d really like to see the possibility of actually implementing commercial apps and services that are more about our interaction and engagement with the physical world rather than the screen.

Related things:

1. Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that......
2. NFC in action A video has surfaced from the recent launch of the......
3. Bluetooth 2.1 incorporating NFC The Bluetooth people are now getting on the NFC bandwaggon,......

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

Related things:

1. New film: Wireless in the World 2 In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations......
2. Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated......
3. Fictional radio-spaces In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in......

Presenting Touch at a event like this is a good opportunity to provide a glimpse into ongoing design and research and a chance to communicate to a broader audience. The talk focused on design as an approach to RFID and how we can use design to understand, communicate and explore emerging technologies.

The presentation consists of condensed presentation of RFID from a technical and material perspective and goes on to describe various aspects of designing with RFID. In this presentation we use the Touch-projects Bowl and Sniff to illustrate the process of designing RFID products. The presentation is available on Slideshare.

Related things:

1. Tangible Interactions – summer exhibition This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions......
2. Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2009 We recently presented our paper Designing with RFID at the......
3. Touch network building The Touch project is receiving considerable interest and over the......

This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions is having its summer exhibition at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The students have been focusing on designing interactions with RFID technology. This years exhibition includes games, token-based media, transactions, wayshowing, a story-telling pillow, ‘twittering’ things and more.

The exhibition is a part of AHO Works.

• 9-12 June 2008 09:00-18:00 in the AHO library (map)
• Official opening 11 June 17:00
• @ Underskog
• Tangible Interactions course blog

• AHO Interaction design Flickr group

Related things:

1. Norwegian Design Council awards Sniff Sniff has won the prize for Design for All at......
2. Touchable services: local interactions In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
3. Workshop: Near field interactions This is a call for proposals for a workshop on......

This is a simple ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ design like the earliest NFC models. Nokia has a history of basing its NFC devices on existing models (see the 5140 from 2004, the 3220 from 2005, and 6131 from 2007). The 6212 looks like it is based on the 3120 classic (announced in February 2008) with the addition of an NFC module and a slightly simplified physical design. Compared with the most recent NFC phone, the 6131, the 6212 is slightly smaller and lighter with a smaller display at the same resolution. More notes on the design details below.

The demo

This interview with Jeremy Belostock—Nokia’s NFC Sales & Marketing Director—has a number of cutaways that show some of the new NFC features in action.

There is a discussion about the path towards the mass market: whether to focus on user acceptance or building infrastructural ‘ecosystems’. NFC is discussed as being immediately suitable for developed markets where there is infrastructure already in place (such as RFID ticketing and credit card systems such as Oyster and Visa Wave). Although emerging markets are interesting, there is a particular emphasises on Western Europe and Asia in NFC transport and payment, because of the immediate benefits in these areas. The interview ends with a brief (and rather odd) discussion of the environmental benefits of NFC. I’m not sure replacing a stack of plastic cards with a mobile phone is necessarily an improvement towards sustainability (most of my credit and debit cards outlast my mobile phones by a factor of 2 or 3).

Interaction design notes

Nokia is attempting to focus on features such as sharing content through touch-interactions and using tags as a way of controlling phone functions. Nokia seems to call these emerging interactions “tapping and sharing”. In the demo we see:

• Tag access to the system functions: we see a tag setting an alarm
• Tag access to files on the system: we see loading and playing of music files

• Peer to peer exchange of content: we see the ‘sharing’ of files

  The specifications also note that it’s possible to “share business cards, bookmarks, calendar notes, images, profiles, and more” so there is clearly a deeper integration between the Series 40 system and the NFC functions here than with earlier devices (we called for this in 2005 when we had the first look at the 3220). What is not shown is the before/after interactions that are required to set up these sharing actions. How do I set up the transfer? What happens if we simply touch phones together? What are the default events? Where and how are these actions phrased within the menu system? Without seeing these we cannot yet assess the quality of these new NFC interactions.

  

  Touch-based interactions are super-simple, orders of magnitude less button clicks and less security hassles than a technology like Bluetooth. This simplicity stems from the physical proximity required when interacting with tiny RFID fields. The demo shows NFC pairing between two devices working in various physical ways: two phones are tapped side to side, face to face and face to back. Previously these interactions were imagined to work back to back but since RFID works through electromagnetic induction, which creates a field that encompasses both sides of the antenna, other physical gestures are possible.

  

  When the NFC chip is given enough power and when the interaction involves two readers rather than a reader powering a passive tag, phone-to-phone interactions will work in many configurations around the device. Although this seems to be a technical reality, I wonder if it makes sense to visualise and explain NFC in this way? Should there be an active point of connection on the phone that is more like a button rather than an active aura surrounding the entire phone? There is an interesting study to be created here about the user’s mental models formed by these subtly different interaction types. More on touch-interaction affordances later.

  This launch is not just about the NFC phone, but points towards a range of NFC appliances: “pairing with a Bluetooth NFC-enabled device, like the new NFC variant of the Nokia BH-210 headset, happens with just one touch”.

  

  At first glance this suggests that new Nokia accessories may have embedded NFC tags, but it seems that “the Bluetooth Headset BH-210 sales package includes a pairing tag that has BH-210 address information in it. Pair the device and headset conveniently by tapping the tag with the device.” When suitable Mifare tags are available down to about 10mm in diameter, why not embed the pairing tag inside the device itself? Perhaps the fear is that pranksters could sneak up to unsuspecting bluetooth-headset-wearing businesspeople and pair with their devices through a sneaky swipe…

  Nonetheless, this points in some interesting directions, towards interfaces and control for all sorts of consumer devices. It highlights the possibility of the mobile phone as a ubiquitous controller where it interacts with a multitude of inputs and outputs from games controllers and sensors to printers and screens, and then perhaps a whole host of other devices that require a rich interface but don’t have the physical form or price range to justify one. For more on this see our thoughts on the universal controller and this research paper by Christof Roduner.

  

  The phone is packaged with three tags, one of which is a ‘tutorial’ tag that teaches the use of NFC with on-screen tutorials. This learning mode seems to include lots of animations where phones and tags are brought into contact with each other, perhaps the least complicated part of NFC interactions. Without seeing it for ourselves its difficult to say, but the tutorials could perhaps be more useful for explaining the possibilities inherent in putting URLs, phone numbers, etc. onto tags.

  Physical design notes

  If we are expected to regularly touch our phones against grubby payment terminals, subway gates and public advertising, the surfaces and materials both on the phone and in the world must encourage this touching action. A robust and rugged shell is essential.

  From the very first mobile phones that could be operated with one hand, Nokia has traditionally been good at creating robust, over-engineered devices that play well in the messy, physical world. The challenge with NFC is to create natural, basic touch interactions through material, ergonomic or other affordances. What are the physical affordances that would encourage—- as Dourish puts it—‘interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience.’? So beyond ruggedness and a degree of scratch-proofing, what is necessary for these touch-interaction affordances?

  

  The first consideration is the placement of the reader. The above image is a quick excercise imagining where readers might be placed on various phone models. The 5140 RFID kit and the 3220 NFC shell had a ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ form that meant that the NFC reader was placed on the lower back of the device. Apparently this was to separate the various radio antennae (GSM, Bluetooth, etc.) from the RFID antenna, but all of our experiments showed that this was confusing to users. The 6131 solved this by placing the NFC reader at the top of the flip-up screen, away from the other antennae at the hinge.

  Somehow the NFC reader in the 6212 is at the top of the device. This is a very good place to have an ‘active area’, it’s outside of the natural hand-grip, and its the part of the phone that most often faces the world, encouraging intuitive pointing and selecting gestures. With this placement the phone becomes a kind of ‘wand’, that perhaps draws on the metaphor of magic in ubiquitous computing. Whatever our thoughts on magic in interaction design, there is no doubt that this gesture is culturally significant and is likely to be a useful model.

  

  More practically, the 6212 features a camera lens in roughly the same position as the reader. This combined with the perforated loudspeaker work against the idea of a robust active area. This is clearly a tradeoff, will scratches and grit getting into these delicate areas hinder touch-based interactions, and will keeping the phone pristine in general be a problem? Would a shiny iPhone ever be suitable for touch-based interactions?

  The second consideration is signs and symbols. There was a time when Nokia thought it necessary to indicate the active area of NFC phones with a visual icon, starting with two concentric rings and moving on to the ‘wireless fingerprint’:

  

  But the 6131 and 6212 have no visible indication whatsoever that they offer any sort of NFC functionality. The clear plastic film that protects the 6131 screen had a diagram of a phone-tag interaction but that of course gets quickly removed.

  My feeling is that there should be clearer markings for the NFC active areas on these phones, even if it is a change in texture, colour or material, it seems like a functional necessity until NFC is properly accepted and understood in the mass market. It’s also a particularly easy thing to do. When music phones have very clearly marked dedicated buttons devoted to specific media functions, why shouldn’t a significant functional and interactional surface be clearly marked on the device?

  

  A few quick sketches using some of the icons from the graphic language for touch. Whether the possibilities inherent in NFC are indicated through clear affordances or explicit symbology, this is extremely important to get right.

  Other technicalities

  The 6212 has a slightly better higher resolution camera than the 6131. It also offers a second video camera on the display side (why do they still include these, does anyone actually do video calling? Is there a secondary usage that I’m missing, YouTube?)

  The press-release and demos emphasise the new level of integration between NFC and Bluetooth but the specifications don’t list Bluetooth 2.1. Of course it supports the standard contactless communication API (JSR 257) so that 3rd parties like us can develop applications for NFC. We hope that it gives us more leeway than the implementation on the 6131. Includes MIDP 2.1 and a few other Java APIs.

  The phone also supports the Nokia Software Market for application discovery and this might be very useful for distributing consumer-focused NFC applications.

  Related things:

  1. NFC in action A video has surfaced from the recent launch of the......
  2. Google, Android and NFC Alongside the persistent rumours of an Apple iPhone with an......
  3. Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2008/05/thoughts-on-nokias-nfc-developments/feed 16 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/12/bowl-token-based-media-for-children http://www.nearfield.org/2007/12/bowl-token-based-media-for-children#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:19:28 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/12/bowl-token-based-media-for-children In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in a research-driven course called Tangible interactions that investigated themes around RFID, NFC and the Touch project. This is one of the projects that emerged from the course.

  Bowl is a project by Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen and Timo Arnall and investigated two design briefs: RFID and the everyday and Playful RFID. The concept, technicalities, process and results are described in detail in the paper at the end of this post, read on for a summary.

  Simple access to media

  The Bowl is a simple media player that can be used by people of all ages, particularly young children. A bowl sits on the living room table and range of physical objects can be placed within it. When an object is placed in the bowl related media is played back on the TV.

  

  For example a physical Moomin character like Little My will play a sequence from the Moomin cartoon where she is featured. Through this simple interface, Bowl encourages new, engaging and playful activities around the media experience.

  Background

  The project draws on a long history of research into ‘tangible interfaces’ for media (some examples). But it is distinct from other projects in that it applies the idea of tangible manipulation of media to the very specific context of the home. It also disregards complex editing, browsing or manipulation of media in favour of providing simple interactions that work for young children.

  There are very few products which allow access to media in a way that can be used by children younger than four. Although it might be argued that children under four shouldn’t have access to media, there is no doubt that they do and in fact there is an enormous amount of content designed exclusively for this audience (see Teletubbies).

  Existing media interfaces are overly complex, allow access to unsuitable content and encourage extended viewing habits. By creating a space for physical and playful engagement where screen-media is only a part of the experience, the Bowl intends to create constrained but self-directed activities that are not only passive, lean-back experiences.

  Testing

  Einar’s daughter, Anna – who features as our main user in this project – was 2 years old at the start of the project. We saw an opportunity here to design, evaluate and iterate an interface aimed particularly at children of that age.

  

  The prototype has been developed through an extensive user-driven process where the product was tested and developed in-situ. The interface has been refined and the content re-edited as we learnt about problems and opportunities through a series of tests.

  

  A standard platform was built very early in the project, from which many bowls and tokens could be evaluated. It was important for this set-up to be lightweight and dynamic so that important interaction parameters could be tweaked and altered. The early prototype was constructed in wood from a simple 2×4 with existing bowls as the interface. This allowed rapid modifications to the setup and although not aesthetically pleasing, didn’t disrupt the home environment or introduce any explicit new ‘gadget’ to the living room.

  

  Through the development of the physical prototype the technical possibilities and challenges were rapidly discovered. Interestingly many technical limitations inherent in the RFID system that we used for prototyping turned out to be non-issues. Some of these limitations actually turned out to be opportunities in the interaction design of the interface. See the paper below for more details.

  Conclusions

  This study has been rich in both the details of physical interactions and conceptual possibilities. We have come a long way towards realising a suitable home media interface for children, using everyday objects and containers. The interaction is simple, natural and works seamlessly as a media experience. The interface can be immediately satisfying without guidance or instruction. As a simple interface rather than a ‘gadget’, it doesn’t depend on changing media infrastructures, standards or platforms. We have designed it as a ‘front-end’ that can be adapted to any kind of home-media system, thus its requirements are likely to stay the same over the lifetime of it’s use and even be adaptable to future technologies.

  The initial planning involved five user-test tasks but due to the richness of the process, we ended up conducting about ten discrete topics and twenty different tests. We regard this sustained, rich access to relevant people and contexts and essential part of developing new interactive products.

  One of our goals was to examine the effects of the changing role of digital technology and content in the home as a result of new interfaces. The long-term testing has offered us an insight into this changing television-based experience. We see increasing connection between playing and watching and more physical activity around media usage.

  Further work

  Beyond this testing process we are in the process of building the next prototype. It has been designed as a durable product that fits within the home context by using standard components and high quality materials.

  

  Here the project is being extended to look at how it might be turned into a product. How it might be ‘shelf explanatory’ and how it might relate to existing media products and services.

  More about Bowl

  Einar has posted more pictures and information about his design case study presentation at DUX 07 including an annotated PDF of his very accessible presentation.

  

  This paper contains a full account of the background, the design process, the testing, technicalities and a discussion of the results. The paper from ‘Designing For User Experiences’ in the Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences are available at the ACM digital library. You can also download the full PDF here.

  See more student work from the Touch project.

  Related things:

  1. iPhone RFID: object-based media This is a video prototype of an iPhone media player......
  2. Place and product-based collaborative filtering In March 2006 fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
  3. Skål: playing with media Skål (Norwegian for bowl) is a product that has emerged......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/12/bowl-token-based-media-for-children/feed 16 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/08/developing-nfc-applications http://www.nearfield.org/2006/08/developing-nfc-applications#comments Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:18:46 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/08/developing-nfc-applications

  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.

  Related things:

  1. Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated......
  2. Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that......
  3. NFC in action A video has surfaced from the recent launch of the......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/08/developing-nfc-applications/feed 14 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/08/rfid-books-weblogs-and-resources http://www.nearfield.org/2006/08/rfid-books-weblogs-and-resources#comments Thu, 17 Aug 2006 11:58:23 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/08/rfid-books-weblogs-and-resources There are a growing number of resources for RFID and related technologies, so I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the resources and reading material that I am finding valuable.

  It may be updated as new things become available.

  

  Books

  Some recommended books on RFID theory and practice.

  RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy

  This is probably the best book on RFID to date, covering a wide range of issues including economics, technologies and applications. Comes highly recommended by Bruce Sterling too. It was catalysed by a workshop at MIT in 2003:

  “Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is rapidly becoming ubiquitous as businesses seek to streamline supply chains and respond to mandates from key customers. But RFID and other new wireless ID technologies raise unprecedented privacy issues. RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy covers these issues from every angle and viewpoint.”

  RFID Handbook

  This book covers the fundamentals and applications in contactless smart cards and identification, and gets quite deep into technology issues in RFID. Although it is primarily a technical book, full of equations and diagrams, it offers a lot of insight into the fundamentals of making this technology, as well as covering basic applications and services.

  RFID Essentials

  Good basic grounding for application, business and technical issues. Focused on EPC applications and logistics and includes sample pseudo code for managing RFID tasks. Read this for the groundwork before exploring the equations in the RFID Handbook above.

  RFID Toys

  A hands on book for hacking RFID readers, writers and transponders. Covers lots of ‘home automation’ and security applications as examples with instructions for making complete systems. Includes a good list of simple RFID hardware for prototyping. It’s available as part of a kit with the Phidgets USB reader/writer.

  Smart card manufacturing

  For industrial designers and manufacturing engineers, covers in great detail how to embed microprocessors into little pieces of plastic. Great diagrams.

  Internet of Things ITU report

  This ITU report looks at the economics, theories and applications that are driving the development of RFID.

  “Takes a look at the next step in “always on” communications, in which new technologies like RFID and smart computing promise a world of networked and interconnected devices that provide relevant content and information whatever the location of the user.”

  Shaping Things

  Bruce Sterling’s book is a manifesto for a more sustainable approach to design, manufacture and everyday life. It’s a fairly quick read, enjoyable and contains many ‘aha’ moments.

  “Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production.”

  Spychips

  Katherine Albrecht & Liz McIntyre write about privacy issues in RFID, offering a stark vision of a future where everything is tracked and connected. Their tone is dramatic and their research examples are often taken out of context, but this is a useful counterpoint to RFID hype.

  Everyware

  Adam Greenfield’s writes about the likely emergence of ubiquitous computing and the social, cultural and ethical problems that may emerge in it’s design and use. Particularly relevant here are thoughts on seamfulness, on mechanisms of payment ‘dissolving in behaviour’ and some great musings on the embodied significance of the Octopus card in Hong Kong.

  “The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?”

  Ambient Findability

  Peter Morville’s book on the ‘design of findable objects’ takes ideas from wayfinding, the web and information architecture, particularly around search, and puts forward ideas on how these might be applied in ubiquitous computing environments.

  “Discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses.”

  Weblogs

  There are many weblogs on RFID being built upon the recent hype around RFID in the supply chain, and they mostly offer industry focused information. Below I’ve listed most of the weblogs I have found, including some that are not about RFID, but cover overlapping ground. The weblogs I find valuable have comments.

  The Pondering Primate

  High volume and interesting weblog by Scott Shaffer that looks at all of the emerging technologies and services that attempt to connect digital information into physical space.

  “As the Internet becomes mobile through the cell phone, I realized the physical world would merge with the electronic one and a tsunami of opportunities would be created. I constantly search for companies and news associated with mobile search, mobile marketing and mobile commerce.”

  Bar Code Nerds

  People obsessed with barcodes and the things you can do with them, and they really are nerds:

  “You know what pisses me off? I’m in the store. I buy 5 different flavors of fruit leather. They are different colors in different packages. Different SKUs with different GTINs, hence each has a different UPC barcode. So what does the cashier do? Scan one and hit the ‘repeat X5’ key. I realize all she’s doing is harvesting the price. To hell with real time inventory tracking.”

  Barcode Blog

  Less commentary and more links to other news sources, but it’s good to see a balanced view between technologies like barcodes and RFID i.e. not so much hype about RFID.

  Semapedia weblog

  A weblog about developments in the Semapedia community:

  “We invite you to create Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks. You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into the form above. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location.”

  Semablog

  Simon Woodside writes about the development of semacode: a 2D barcode system that is an open platform, and plugs into many of the important building blocks of the internet and mobile platforms.

  “Semacode’s software provides the tools necessary to build applications that combine aspects of the virtual world into the real world. It works by combining existing standardized elements — camera phones, optical barcodes, URLs — into an integrated system.”

  Contactless News

  Lots of news and articles on developments in contactless payment including smart cards and NFC. The articles go behind a subscription service after 60 days, so make sure you get relevant quotes while they are still there…

  Spychips blog

  Albrecht and McIntyre, authors of Spychips rampage against RFID and forefront privacy issues with auto ID and tracking technologies.

  RFID Innovationlab

  A Danish RFID weblog from people at the Innovation Lab in Katrinebjerg that covers a lot of ground.

  RFID in Japan

  Shin’ichi Konomi writes about developments in RFID in Japan. This blog has uncovered numerouse interesting user-centred developments in RFID and barcode technology as well as unusual and quirky uses.

  RFID Law Blog

  This weblog could be really good (and it gets it kind of right in the legislation category) but it tends to re-publish other news stories when it could be providing useful insight and commentary on important legal issues.

  RFID Buzz

  A low volume but very smart and focused weblog, looking at privacy issues in passports, credit cards, gaming and other alternative uses.

  RFID in libraries

  I trust the librarians to get it right.

  RFID Journal

  The RFID industry authority, with events, news, features and case studies. Very industry focused.

  RFID Gazette

  High volume weblog with lots of industry news.

  Other weblogs: Payments news, RFID Lowdown, RFID Times, RFID Today, RFID Detail, The RFID Weblog, Using RFID news, RFID Update.

  Online resources

  Mediamatic Reader on RFID

  This reader compiles a number of resources on the technical and philosophical aspects of RFID.

  Security & Privacy in RFID Systems

  A large resource of technical papers on security and privacy. You can subscribe to a mailing list to be notified when new papers are added (Could we have an RSS feed too please)!

  “The goal of this page is to reference works related to security and privacy in RFID systems. The bibliography contains references toward refereed papers published in journals and conference proceedings, as well as technical reports and thesis. It is updated on an irregular basis depending on the flow of papers published in the domain.”

  RFID Primer

  There are numerous guides and primers on RFID around the web, but this is perhaps the best, from AIM the global association of everything Identifiable.

  Internet of things: Working bibliography

  This Internet of things bibliography compiled by Anne Galloway is a good place to start looking at the wider implications of RFID as seen by industry and (primarily ubiquitous computing) academia.

  No related posts.

  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/08/rfid-books-weblogs-and-resources/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/06/rob-van-kranenburg-at-how-i-learned-to-love-rfid http://www.nearfield.org/2006/06/rob-van-kranenburg-at-how-i-learned-to-love-rfid#comments Sun, 11 Jun 2006 18:34:02 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/06/rob-van-kranenburg-at-how-i-learned-to-love-rfid On the 20th May, Rob van Kranenburg talked at How I learned to love RFID in HMKV in Dortmund, Germany.

  This is a short summary of a huge presentation on RFID issues, that covered many valuable topics including local activism, EU policy on ubiquitous computing, participatory culture and distributed computing. Rob seems to be someone that thinks many times faster than he talks, and has so many valuable things to say, that it’s very difficult to succinctly summarise his presentation.

  
  Rob van Kranenburg lecture at HMKV, Dortmund.

  Background

  Few people talk about genetically modified foods anymore, genetic modification is now something that is talked about in fashion circles as a creative technology. The field has taken about 10 years to get to the point where the discussion is no longer about ethics but about fashion.

  In the case of RFID, we are perhaps at the beginning of this process: RFID has become Smart Cards, Near Field Communication, M2M, etc. There is a huge re-branding effort going on, and there is little debate about using Smart Cards for public transport for instance.

  We are dealing not just with technology, protocols or standards: but a context: a deadlock between technology and the environment. From the technology of the pen onwards there has been tension about externalising what should be internal. Distributing information to the environment implies that we trust the environment. But people have a deep, deep mistrust of the environment. It is also very hard to come to terms with something that has a 100% memory, we are all highly analogue.

  In an experiment to probe this mistrust The Watch out team was welcomed to a small town in Netherlands: to watch out for everyday things. The enthusiasm with which they were welcomed was scary, see this quote from the above link:

  “The idea of this performance like intervention was to draw feedback of the kind that would get the joke, that would be aimed at the experienced top down disciplining process going on. What happened instead was far more interesting but also far more disturbing. Whenever they were approached with a question like what kind of organization are you from, they’d reply: the government. We are the Watch Out Team, a new government sponsored initiative. At the market where they dished out watch out umbrella stickers to grateful umbrella holders I overheard a daughter telling her mother: “They should have done this much sooner!””

  RFID and the EU

  “I will not see the liberty of citizens and their fundamental rights being compromised”
  – Viviane Reding

  The EU sees RFID as a key technology that will shape the age of the Ubiquitous Network Society. RFID tags will be nodes in most future ubiquitous IT systems, and the glue that binds ubiquitous computing together.

  Behind this vision, they claim a strong social concern. Can this intention be upheld when we are in the midst of a ‘war on terror’ and RFID is a perfect candidate for tracking and control?

  But overall the EU seems to be doing a pretty good job of scoping out the issues of RFID, and aiming towards world governance of RFID issues.

  How should we deal with privacy?

  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.

  EMF leakage will also be a huge problem. One approach would be to specify zones for different kinds of sensors, how do we solve this visually? Digital territory, digital bubbles, various mediascapes, seamless technology, networked objects, etc.

  We need to design for emergence: the behaviour of an agent cannot be entirely pre-programmed: we need to launch and learn. We also need better interactions and relationships, opening up space for more consumer control. Interestingly, and perhaps problematically, there is currently no competitor/predator for the ubiquitous computing model.

  Changing dynamics of society

  A digital network turns civilians into professional amateurs. We see a growth of informal networks operating between a formal policy level, and a idiosyncratic everyday life. As an example, the browser has drastically disrupted the dynamics of society, from house buying to local politics to personal relationships. We are seeing a revolution from below. We cannot hand over ubiquitous connectivity and expect people to stay the same.

  To probe this, a scenario was created, depicting the death of the EU in 12 steps which shows that Europe is a dying dynamic. People are being more pro-active in local planning, new business models disrupting existing businesses (real estate for instance), and the localised tax system becoming increasingly irrelevant. It was particularly interesting to start to make this link between bottom-up, participatory culture and the distributed technologies like RFID.

  More

  Rob has just completed a report on RFID with co-authors Matt Ward and Gaynor Backhouse. It’s a great overview of RFID technology and use:

  “This TechWatch report provides a brief discussion of these issues as well as a detailed examination of RFID technology, including some of the current uses within research, administration and teaching and learning. The report also includes an overview of the significance of RFID as an enabling technology towards achieving the ‘seamless’ and ‘calm’ vision of ubiquitous computing, the role of the Internet of Things, and plots a future trajectory for RFID development within the wider context of wireless, networked environments.”

  Download the report here.

  Related things:

  1. Bruce Sterling at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Bruce Sterling talked at How I......
  2. FoeBud: How we learned to stop RFID FoeBud are a German group of privacy activists that has......
  3. The RFID photo booth At last year’s Picnic conference we created a networked Photo......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/06/rob-van-kranenburg-at-how-i-learned-to-love-rfid/feed 0 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/05/touch-project-interview http://www.nearfield.org/2006/05/touch-project-interview#comments Wed, 10 May 2006 06:46:03 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/05/touch-project-interview In December 2005 I was interviewed for Printed and Disposable Electronics News about the Touch project, the future of RFID and on the social implications of NFC. Here is the plain interview, since an online version of the magazine is not available.

  1. Explain what the ‘The Touch Project’ is and what it hopes to achieve?

  The Touch project looks at the personal and social use of RFID, driven by the growing availability of NFC enabled mobile phones. We see that there is significant potential for user-driven applications of RFID beyond logistics and supply chain management. We envision RFID not just as a replacement for barcodes, but as a technology that could affect our interactions with everyday objects. Simplistic examples of this might be personally marking the physical environment with information or enabling social contact through physical things. Touch intends to look closely at behaviour and activities in everyday life, and to build RFID applications that support, enhance or change those activities in useful, interesting or playful ways.

  2. What technology will the project make use of and what advances do you hope to make in the uses of these technologies?

  At the moment the project makes use of standard mobile phones from Nokia (the 3220 and 5140) and re-writeable MiFare RFID tags.

  

  The project doesn’t intend to advance the state of the art in technology, it hopes to develop applications and knowledge around the use of RFID. However, it is likely that the project will uncover latent needs for certain kinds of tags and technologies, for example printable tags in mass-produced stickers or washable tags in clothes. It is also clear that the project will have a voice on user-centred privacy, and this may turn into technological recommendations for the privacy and security of tags.

  3. Explain how the project will make use of RFID tags?

  The project looks at the ways in which tags can be embedded in everyday objects, spaces and environments. At the moment we are particularly looking at the personal space of the home, as a place to augment things with information.

  

  In the near future we will be looking at the ways in which RFID tags can be used as social objects: gifts, business cards, stickers or flyposting in public space.

  4. What has been the reponse of industry and the retail markets to the project? Will the new concepts developed aid advertising and marketing in the future?

  At the moment there is a lot of interest in NFC in general, we are looking at ways of presenting our research to industry: to encourage it to shift it’s focus from traditional markets (the back-end logistics side) to making useful products for users. We are not interested in aiding the marketing of RFID as a technology, but we are interested in new activities and behaviours around it, that may in turn, make it more visible, useful and acceptable to people.

  5. How will the use of NFC help drive innovation in retail, marketing and public services?

  In retail the innovations are mainly around usability improvements. The ability to connect the real world to the virtual world: the billing and banking abilities of the telecoms directly to ‘touchable’ physical objects may change the retail experience drastically. This change may uncover new markets around craft objects and short-run items outside of the mass market. In marketing there are clear applications for service discovery: touching a poster or magazine to download a URL or ringtone. In public services it should become easier to report local issues, by easily notifying services about problems in specific locations.

  6. What new markets and uses for technology have you uncovered so far during the course of the project?

  Games are an interesting area of development, we are thinking about prior examples such as “Pokemon”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokémon and NeoPets, that are based on real and virtual trading.

  

  We think that RFID based functions will have a large part to play in these socially driven gaming worlds, where physical objects can be swapped and combined in different ways to affect virtual games worlds. We think there are also markets in furniture, industrial and service design, where RFID can provide object history, re-cycling information, located instruction manuals, etc.

  7. How has ‘The Touch Project’ changed peoples attitude to technology? Do you think the use of RFID, NFC and interaction with digital services and objects will become as easy for Europeans as it is starting to be in the Far East, particularly Japan?

  This has yet to be seen. This is the first time in the popular-history of RFID that it is actually useful for the user or consumer; until now it has been an invasive, corporate technology. NFC tests by Philips in Caen, France have been very positive, and generally the people that are using the phones here have said that it feels very natural to touch tags with the phone, and to interact with information in a more tangible way.

  

  So far we have encountered some physiological and social problems with the technology: for instance it is difficult for people to walk up to posters or stickers on the street and touch them with their phone. This is not ‘normal behaviour’ in public space, at least in Scandinavia. However, given that the technology is being pushed heavily as ‘Wallet phones’ and for ticketing, we expect these kinds of interactions to become more natural and habitual over time.

  8. Are people just inherently suspicious of technology or are you finding an open mind set on these things?

  Amongst technology-literate users there is a very suspicious attitude towards the technology. The governmental (In Norway, US, etc.) use of RFID in passports and other sensitive places (like Goodyear’s tyres) is quite rightly furthering this negative attitude. We are working with a technology that has huge potential for creative mis-use and we need to be very sensitive to that.

  

  Amongst non-technology-literate users there is a very valuable process of discovery, as the phones open up new possibilities of interactions that were previously hidden. This opens up the controversial technology to discussion in places where it wouldn’t have arisen before.

  9. In the design of ‘The Touch Project’ have you looked at the way the Japanese use mobiles,digital and NFC technology?

  We are following Japanese developments closely, particularly through Shin’ichi Konomi’s great weblog. Our exploratory research begins in Tokyo and Seoul in 2006. The use of NFC compatible phones is reaching critical mass, with DoCoMo predicting “ten million “wallet phones by March 2006. The use of 2D barcodes or QR codes in magazines, advertising and signage is also great inspiration, it is ‘prior art’ for things that RFID may be applied to.

  9. What do you see as the future in these areas of technology? How will our lives change over the next 20 years in terms of interaction with technology?

  The big shift that we are seeing right now is a move towards tangible interaction: a move away from the screen and into physical objects and spaces. At the mass-market forefront of this is gaming with Sony’s EyeToy and Nintendo Revolution with gestural control.

  

  RFID and NFC should be the enablers of the move towards tangible interaction within everyday objects. There are enormous cognitive, physiological and social problems with using small screens in our rich, messy world (for example browsing a web page on a busy bus with shopping, text messaging while walking, or browsing in a restaurant). If we can move any of these functions out into the real world: answering the phone by touching a tag, or setting the profile of the phone to silent by putting it in a certain spot, then we have reduced the reliance on the already overloaded screen.

  10. Do you think that this type of technology could actually become invasive and be used as a tool to track peoples movements or spy on them?

  This depends if we are talking about NFC phones or RFID tags.

  The phones will usher in a more secure use of RFID: they can be turned on and off at will, and have more processing power for security and encryption, unlike most contactless ticket/credit cards that feature relatively weak security. One of the interesting potentials in NFC is the ability to read and write your own tags via the mobile phone, which effectively reverses some of the usual notions of RFID as a tracking and surveillance medium.

  However, once written, most tags are insecure and we can’t control the leakage of data from them. If the use of NFC leads to us adorning our friends, clothes, objects and artefacts with tags, then there are of course implications for tracking and surveillance. This needs to be taken into account as we design applications and services around it.

  

  Compared with other pervasive technologies however the implications for RFID are quite low. Of course there are already cases of Skimming of cards in wallets, hacking of Speedpass payment systems and it’s possible to ‘Relay’ a contactless credit card from someone’s pocket to a reader. But in terms of tracking people and surveillance, RFID has physical limitations on reading distance, in that beyond a few metres the signal is reduced to noise. If we compare this with an ordinary mobile phone, which most of the time knows where you are to within about 100 metres, knows what you say both in voice and text messages (with no guarantee of privacy), the privacy issues are somewhat out of proportion.

  This is also generating fascinating new counter-markets for things like RFID-proof paper and fabrics. Contactless credit cards for instance need to be sent in the post, and RFID ‘smart cards’ might be held safely within a faraday cage wallet.

  11. Obviously these types of technology are to aid in the accumulation of information or dissemination of information but could there be a potential for misuse of such information or fraud?

  On a broad level there is a clear danger of that. The thoughtless use of biometric RFID data in passports and other documents will inevitably lead to cases of digital fraud and misuse.

  On a narrower level though, I am more concerned about how RFID, GPS and other ‘tracking’ technologies may effect our close social relationships. Much is made of the typical scenario for location based services: the ability to ‘see that my friends are just around the corner’. But the management, reciprocity and deniability of this information needs to be taken into account.

  12. What social and communicative uses for this type of technology has ‘The Touch Project’ uncovered so far?

  So far we have been looking at augmenting personal objects in the home: the desk, the fridge, the doorframe, the kitchen table, etc. It has so far been possible to test out the use of everyday objects as triggers for phonecalls, SMSes and URLs. We haven’t started looking at the more social and communicative aspects of the technology yet, we are waiting for more phones to reach the market, and the general awareness of the technology to be higher before we conduct larger scale studies.

  Related things:

  1. Touch project Touch is a research project at the Interaction Design department......
  2. Teaching Touch II For the second year we are teaching an MA interaction......
  3. Images of touch interfaces I’m happy to say that with great contributions from Nicolas......
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