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.

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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.

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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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The most compelling content was the early visualisations of cellular networks, made by Motorola and AT&T at the time that they were trying to convince the FCC that mobile telephony was important.

It also features rather nice footage and photos of early mobile phone prototypes from Motorola, that displayed many contemporary form factors such as sliders and flip-phones. Worth checking out that full article for a bit of emerging tech/design history.

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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.

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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2008/05/thoughts-on-nokias-nfc-developments/feed 16 http://www.nearfield.org/2008/05/three-papers-on-mobile-payments http://www.nearfield.org/2008/05/three-papers-on-mobile-payments#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 13:06:55 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/?p=287 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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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2008/05/three-papers-on-mobile-payments/feed 0 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/future-nfc-phone-is-talk-of-festival http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/future-nfc-phone-is-talk-of-festival#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:39:04 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/future-nfc-phone-is-talk-of-festival

  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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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/future-nfc-phone-is-talk-of-festival/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/green-touch-at-dott07 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/green-touch-at-dott07#comments Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:23:24 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/green-touch-at-dott07

  In collaboration with Helsinki-based development project Social Objects we have developed an installation called Green Touch. The exhibition encourage visitors to touch the design objects on display with mobile devices, in order to explore different aspects of their making, production and impact.

  Green Touch builds upon Thinglink that socially connects and creates information surrounding products, and brings the interface to mobile devices. We use the NFC-enabled Nokia 6131 to connect design objects to information about the maker, the materials and processes behind the objects. Although this has been explored from a system perspective – particularly with barcodes – here we focus on the experience of using a mobile interface to access this kind of information: through images, sound and tactile feedback.

  

  The installation consists of Finnish design products that all carry a unique story. The products are marked with Near Field Communication (NFC) tags that link to content that can be seen and heard on the mobile phone. When you touch these products with a Nokia 6131 they give you audiovisual and tactile feedback.

  Come and see it demonstrated at Dott07 in Newcastle on Tuesday 23 October 2007.

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  3. The first NFC appliance Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/green-touch-at-dott07/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/touch-orders-with-rfid-dongles http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/touch-orders-with-rfid-dongles#comments Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:17:56 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/touch-orders-with-rfid-dongles A while ago some interesting projects attached passive RFID tags to ordinary mobile phones to enable participation within RFID-based ticketing, payment or infrastructure.

  I wrote about this way of retro-fitting mobile phones with RFID. Simply attaching passive RFID tags to mobile handsets allows new functions to be added without integration into the phone itself. This offers some insight into the ways in which the phone is becoming central to everyday activity; where it acts as a hub for other touch-based functions like payment, ticketing and access.

  Now there are some very interesting observations by Flickr user Superlocal (on the Poketo blog) about the integration of NFC readers into standard Korean mobile phones. This is enabled by the mandated standards for data and power connections for mobile phones in Korea, so that any phone has a standard hardware interface.

  

  Here McDonalds is offering customers an “RFID Dongle” that plugs into the data and power connections of almost any phone. Once an application is downloaded, the dongle allows selection and payment to be made from an RFID menu at every table. The system is called ‘touch order’.

  

  This system allows much richer mobile interaction than a passive RFID tag allows, given that this is a reader, with access to secure phone applications, billing and data services – the full functions of NFC.

  There are other manufacturers such as SDID, Sirit and ACG that offer NFC modules that plug in to standard interfaces like SD slots, but these are not yet being used for mass-market applications.

  It is interesting to see McDonalds and SK Telecom introducing such a high-technology solution and providing shared hardware infrastructure to customers in order to enable it before NFC phones are mass-market. The application and service is rather mundane (in fact we might even call it an interaction design cliché), but it’s interesting that it has been made; it is out in the world being used. I’m interested to know how this works in practice, over the long-term.

  CNET Asia, My digital life and Far East Gizmos write more about the context of the ‘touch order’ system.

  More photos of the menus, instructions and screen interface from Superlocal.

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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/touch-orders-with-rfid-dongles/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/08/time-motion-and-touch http://www.nearfield.org/2007/08/time-motion-and-touch#comments Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:07:39 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/08/time-motion-and-touch

  The rhetoric of ‘mobile life’ is that technology will make motion more possible, easier, and that having access to information will make our lives easier, transcending time and space. This spectacular notion of global mobility has been around since the mobile phone became an essential business tool. Indeed mobile telephony, mostly voice and SMS has had a great impact on many of our daily lives.

  But our conception of the internet hasn’t yet accounted well for the meanings of time, motion and touch. In a recent post Julian Bleecker begins to think about these semantics ways of approaching ‘the internets’ that involves a greater appreciation of context:

  “It might be interesting to consider time, motion and touch as idioms whose characteristics should not be mitigated against, at least for the purpose of reflecting up on what digital life would be like if we operated in a middle ground between eliminating time delays, for instance, and having some dependence upon it.”

  Look at for instance how the mobile internet has stumbled and failed in so many ways as it attempts to take the ‘fixed internet’ and apply it to mobile devices. In some respects this is a usability problem, where the newness of the devices are hindering our understanding of how to design well. But in most cases there is a lack of understanding of the way that our digital and physical selves overlap, how the chronology of our daily existence should be complemented, subverted, interrupted or engaged. How do we design for people in motion with routines and behaviours, in particular contexts where notions of interaction, interruption and engagement differ?

  Working with touch we constantly brush up against these issues: How does the gesture of touch define our relationship to things, places and other people? How do particular interactions relate to places or contexts? These are difficult design issues. In the end we think it comes down to designing things in context, usually within very narrowly defined contexts. Using tools like design probes, rapid prototyping and self-ethnography becomes critical.

  Julian is working towards some specific goals with his project:

  “The interaction semantics I’m angling at is this idea of creating an application syntax based on establishing a sense of Durable Affinity between a person, a lively designed object, and the expression in a digital, online form that these two can create through time, motion and touch based activity.”

  This approach of building and making in order to discover how these issues play out in practice should lead to interesting results.

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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/08/time-motion-and-touch/feed 0 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/08/felica-promotional-video http://www.nearfield.org/2007/08/felica-promotional-video#comments Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:26:46 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/08/felica-promotional-video Another video demonstrating NFC technology. Look past the promotional spin and there are a lot of interesting clips of various NFC technologies in use.

  Felica is developed by Sony and is compatible with NFC standards.

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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/08/felica-promotional-video/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/mobile-payment-demo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/mobile-payment-demo#comments Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:47:31 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/mobile-payment-demo The near-future success of NFC depends on the usability of mobile payments and ticketing. As interaction designers we of course argue that the success hinges on good design of this experience and recent news suggests that there is little to recommend mobile payments unless they offer some useful new features (see Place and product based collaborative filtering).

  So it’s good to see work that explores the details of the transaction interface (see our design brief). This video shows “A mobile payment demo using Welcome’s NFC applet integrated with a payment application in a mobile phone.”:

  More detail at Aneace Haddad’s weblog.

  It’s great to see that the transaction is very fast and there is at least basic audible feedback at the point of touching. It’s also interesting to note the integration of a paper receipt into the process. While a mobile wallet can provide payment history and receipts, the paper receipt builds trust in the transaction and its value should not be overlooked.

  Compare and contrast to other NFC demo videos, what kinds of interactions are working here? Does anyone else notice that NFC interactions that rely heavily on the screen seem awkward?

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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/mobile-payment-demo/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/airtag-and-blog-nfc http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/airtag-and-blog-nfc#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:22:31 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/airtag-and-blog-nfc Discovered today is Airtag, makers of the AIR kiosk:

  

  “AIRKIOSK is an interactive kiosk especially designed for points of sales.
  AIRKIOSK is connected to the AIRTAG central application platform.
  Multi-standard, it can read all RFID tags and cards (13,56MHz). Applications include: Express ordering kiosk, Contactless payment, Identification and animation on the POS, Loyalty and couponning, Interactive advertisement.”

  Their overall design profile and the attention to detail in their products looks promising.

  Their Blog NFC is also a new addition to our list of NFC/RFID related blogs.

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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/airtag-and-blog-nfc/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/retro-fitting-mobile-phones-with-rfid http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/retro-fitting-mobile-phones-with-rfid#comments Sat, 07 Jul 2007 16:50:44 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/retro-fitting-mobile-phones-with-rfid The promise of NFC is about easily using mobile phones as a part of daily life: ticketing, paying with a credit card, opening doors, sharing, printing and downloading in the physical world. But until NFC technology is widely adopted, are there opportunities for using some of the features of RFID-interactions without the integration into the handset?

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

  

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

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

  

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

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

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

  More on the story here and here.

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

  

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

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

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

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  3. Reboot 8: Mobile presence The thing that struck me most at Reboot 8 was......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/retro-fitting-mobile-phones-with-rfid/feed 9 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/nfc-at-wikipedia http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/nfc-at-wikipedia#comments Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:27:41 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/nfc-at-wikipedia I revisited the Near Field Communication at Wikipedia page this week. For a long time it was a copy and paste of the About NFC page from the NFC Forum, but now it has evolved into a page of its own:

  

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

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

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  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/2007/07/nfc-at-wikipedia/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/interactions-of-transactions http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/interactions-of-transactions#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:44:07 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/interactions-of-transactions This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

  References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  See also Recent NFC news and links.

  Read more about these design briefs.

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  2. Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated......
  3. Touchable services: local interactions In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/interactions-of-transactions/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/interfacing-the-internet-of-things http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/interfacing-the-internet-of-things#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2007 20:59:19 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/interfacing-the-internet-of-things This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

  

  The ‘internet of things’ is a vision of a world full of interconnected things that participate in a wider network of the internet. The idea has been driven by the proliferation of wireless networks and the increasing use of RFID in logistical applications, many see it as the inevitable result of the insatiable drive for efficiency in the globalised marketplace.

  So far applications have been limited to logistics and inventory management; outside of the experience of most people. But if every product is tagged and tracked there are certainly implications for people at the consumer / user / human end of the supply chain. Although many have speculated on how the ‘internet of things’ might be interfaced from this perspective, there has been very little interaction design work towards user-needs, prototypes or testing out ideas.

  With the introduction of the first NFC devices in 2004 some people started thinking of the mobile phone as a human interface for a machine-readable, internet of things world. This was driven by a desire to have more agency over ubiquitous technologies like RFID and to perhaps reverse some of the dominant structures of privacy and control imposed by RFID systems.

  Do NFC devices have a role to play as an interface for the internet of things? If NFC devices become commonplace how might they be used as interfaces for products, services and brands?

  In this project you should look at specific users, contexts or situations and create ideas for the way in which trackable, identifiable objects could engage with them. You could also take existing things as a starting point for new interfaces, keeping use and context in mind.

  The design process here may be in danger of being fragmented, including methodologies from interaction and service design, as well as business, marketing and technology. It will be very important to lay out specific values, goals and contexts at every level in order to keep strong constraints on the project.

  References

  ITU Internet Reports 2005: The Internet of Things. “The report 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.

  Internet of things: working bibliography. Anne Galloway traces the history of the ‘internet of things’, a lot of good sources.

  Siorpaes, S, et al. Mobile Interaction with the Internet of Things. Embedded Interaction Research Group, Media Informatics Group, University of Munich / DoCoMo Eurolabs. PDF

  Roduner, C. The Mobile Phone as a Universal Interaction Device – Are There Limits? Institute for Pervasive Computing, Department of Computer Science ETH Zurich. PDF

  Near field interactions. Workshop on user-centred interactions with the internet of things at Nordichi 2006, October 14 and 15, 2006 in Oslo, Norway. PDF

  Read more about these design briefs.

  Related things:

  1. Internet of Things booklet Rob van Kranenburg is creating what looks like an interesting......
  2. RFID & the internet of things Julian Bleecker, Arie Altena and I will be participating at......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/07/interfacing-the-internet-of-things/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/06/universal-design-with-nfc http://www.nearfield.org/2007/06/universal-design-with-nfc#comments Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:06:09 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/06/universal-design-with-nfc This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

  

  NFC has been suggested as an enabling platform for universal design or design for all. Universal design can be summed up as: “the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.” (Source)

  There are perhaps many reasons that NFC is seen as an enabling technology in this area:

  • Touching an object with a mobile device is seen as a simple and intuitive gesture, and may be easier than interfacing through buttons
  • Moving services and functions out into a physical interface may present opportunities that are not possible when navigating hierarchical menus
  • An NFC device has multiple modes of input and feedback and can present information in a perceptible way across many senses
  • An NFC mobile device can contain user-preferences and identification, which can present information or services relevant to the user’s needs

    So: how might NFC be used to create interfaces that are appropriate for the widest range of users?

    One of the most basic NFC interactions is using a physical object as a call or SMS request: touching an object creates a phonecall or an SMS. A common scenario is using a collection of photo frames to make phonecalls instead of accessing names through the phone menu. This can be easily achieved by attaching NFC tags behind photos or inside photo frames. But there is a distinct lack of research and testing in this area, and so far there is no proof that this is easier or more desirable for any group of users.

    In this project we would like you to create applications that use NFC in ways that makes mobile applications easier to use for a wide range of users. These applications should be designed and tested out in collaboration with a range of potential user-groups.

    References

    Access-ability A great document covering transport, ticketing, financial transactions, public access terminals, telecommunications, smart housing, smart media and biometrics, touchscreens, keypads, typefaces, pictograms, icons and symbols, audio input and output, wireless systems, training, instruction books and help facilities. 

    Universal Design – Clarifying the Concept “The principles of universal design are being applied in a growing number of spheres. In Norway, these principles have already been integrated into several acts of legislation and efforts are underway to incorporate them into even more of the statutory framework. To ensure that the principles remain operational, it is necessary to clarify the scope of the concept of universal design, and to specify more clearly the opportunities and ramifications this implies.”

    Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards Section 508 makes sure that federal employees with disabilities have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to the access and use by Federal employees who are not individuals with disabilities. This document covers the basics from software and web to telecommunications and media products.

    Accessibility Guidelines for Public Access Terminals Good information on accessibility for public access terminals like information kiosks, ticket vending machines, information displays, point of sale customer card payment systems and card door entry systems.

    SmartTouch project A pilot project in Oulu is using NFC as a basis for eldercare services: “The City’s elderly care department, its catering service Oulun Ateria and logistics firm Oulun Logistiikka have been engaged in a pilot project involving ordering meals for the elderly based on touch technology.”

    Seeing Eye Phone Mentioned briefly in the ‘Touching the future’ competition winners is the Seeing Eye Phone, an NFC-based service that converts product information into synthesised speech. While this is not strictly a universal design it’s an interesting example of the mobile phone acting as an intermediary between physically located information and other senses.

    Read more about these design briefs.

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