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 a [...]

Tom Igoe’s new book Making things talk arrived today, full of lovely projects and code examples. Tom’s previous book Physical computing has been the definitive reference for all hardware hacking that goes on at AHO and in the Touch project. Making things talk is structured into specific projects, and covers technology as part of practical [...]

We have been making a lot of prototypes with the Innovations ID12 RFID readers in the past few months. We’ve been getting them from the super-helpful Core RFID, and now Sparkfun is selling them.

The ID12s measure just 25mm x 26mm and include their own antenna. They are great because they are packaged in a form [...]

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 [...]

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

The landscape of RFID technology is focused on surveillance, efficiency and control. The near-future possibility of RFID implants, identity cards and passports is focused on the ability to efficiently and accurately identify people. The rush to replace barcodes with RFID is [...]

As our interaction design students get deeper into prototyping with RFID, we needed to start looking at the range of possibilities around the materials and forms of RFID tags. Last week we created a demonstration board of all the RFID tags that we have collected over the last year. Most of these tags are available [...]

The Bluetooth people are now getting on the NFC bandwaggon, the following video shows Mike Foley of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group demonstrating features that are NFC-based:

Bluetooth has historically lacked a compelling ‘user-experience’, with passcodes and security getting in the way of adept interactions. It’s interesting here to see how NFC is being introduced as [...]

So this week Touch is running an informal workshop where we are looking at the materiality of RFID, potentials in Radio Frequency and EMF, and building simple interactions and services using the technology.
With us this week are Matt and Jack of Schulze & Webb, Even, Simen and Alex from Bengler, and Matt Karau (formerly [...]