A Dutch company, Swinxs is developing a physical RFID-based console with RFID wristbands for children. They claim to be encouraging physical activities and ‘stimulating imagination’. The console includes versions of Tag, multiple Quiz games, Hide and Seek and Charades. The base-station connects to the internet for uploading scores and downloading content. The movie on their [...]
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RFID peripherals
Plug and play RFID-reading USB peripherals are all the rage, as indicated by a stream of recent product announcements. These readers plug into a PC and make various things happen when they are touched with an RFID tag. RFID readers are small and cheap, encapsulating them in packaging and offering a standard USB interface makes [...]
Images of touch interfaces
I’m happy to say that with great contributions from Nicolas Nova, Matt Jones and many others, the pool of images of ‘touch interfaces’ on Flickr is growing nicely. I originally asked for contributions in February 2005, and the pool has been growing steadily ever since. This collection of ‘vernacular’ designs for RFID-based interfaces is extremely [...]
Contact-less
From the Picnic conference last year, Mediamatic’s ‘RFID safe’ which protects your wireless RFID cards from being read or ‘skimmed’. With Mifare security problems a reality, and the ability to skim cards such as the Oyster fairly easily, I wonder how common these things will become? Related Anti Skimming Devices Highly Recommended for This Year’s [...]
Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments
On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that incorporates Near Field Communication technology. This phone is the fourth NFC-capable phone from Nokia in as many years and it is the first NFC device that supports 3G data connections. This is a simple ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ design like the earliest NFC models. Nokia has [...]
Norwegian Design Council awards Sniff
Sniff has won the prize for Design for All at Unge Talenter 2008 (Young Talent 2008) from the Norwegian Design Council. The project is acclaimed for its inclusive design that encourages playful activity, particularly for overcoming spoken or physical barriers to communication between people of different ages and abilities. It also gets praised for its [...]
RFID and unique physical form
Lisa Smith is a Masters of Design student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Designed objects. I first encountered her work through pictures of her project ‘Cuteness generator’ on Flickr. This looks like a lovely project dealing with many issues through visual, physical and interactional material. One of the key aspects [...]