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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The ad was made by BBH London with creative director Pete Bradly (more info and making of videos). Interesting to see a one minute commercial explain touch/contactless technology.

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This collection of ‘vernacular’ designs for RFID-based interfaces is extremely interesting for us, as we delve deeper into the visual representation of emerging technologies.

If you have images of good, bad and especially odd interfaces where interaction with an RFID tag or NFC mobile phone is indicated with an icon or an interestingly designed physical enclosure, please add it to the pool by tagging it ‘touch interface’.

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“If you really want to know what information processing dissolving in behaviour really looks like, catch the way women swing their handbags across the Octopus readers at the turnstiles of the Mong Kok subway station; there’s nothing in the slightest to suggest that this casual 0.3-second gesture is the site of intense technical intervention.”

Some of the most common RFID gestures that have truly become part of everyday life are in contactless ticketing. Here are some images I took in Seoul, South Korea:

Surprisingly, there is not a lot of work on the spatial or gestural aspects of radio-based interfaces. There is some work towards looking at the spatial aspects of camera-based interactions:

Reeves, S. et al., 2006. The spatial character of sensor technology. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Designing Interactive systems. University Park, PA, USA: ACM Press, pp. 31-40.

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

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

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

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

  

  More details on the service/interaction design:

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

• The passenger is billed once a month

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

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

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

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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2008/05/touch-and-travel/feed 3 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/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/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/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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