Designing Tangible User Interfaces for NFC Phones

Mikko Pyykkönen,Ismo Alakärppä,Sonja Saukkonen,Ivan Sanchez,Marta Cortes,Jukka Riekki

doi:10.1155/2012/575463

Mikko Pyykkönen, Ismo Alakärppä + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/575463

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Abstract

The increasing amount of NFC phones is attracting application developers to utilize NFC functionality. We can hence soon expect a large amount of mobile applications that users command by touching NFC tags in their environment with their NFC phones. The communication technology and the data formats have been standardized by the NFC Forum, but there are no conventions for advertising to the users NFC tags and the functionality touching the tags triggers. Only individual graphical symbols have been suggested when guidelines for advertising a rich variety of functionality are called for. In this paper, we identify the main challenges and present our proposal, a set of design guidelines based on more than twenty application prototypes we have built. We hope to initiate discussion and research resulting in uniform user interfaces for NFC-based services.

Highlights

Near field communication (NFC) technology [1] enables building tangible user interfaces [2] for mobile phones
Separate NFC readers are available as well, and the technology supports communication between two NFC readers and readers that emulate tags, but we focus in this paper on NFC phones reading NFC tags placed in the environment
We focus in this paper on reading NFC tags placed in the environment with mobile phones equipped with NFC readers

Summary

Introduction

Near field communication (NFC) technology [1] enables building tangible user interfaces [2] for mobile phones. Users can start services and give commands to the services by touching objects in their local environment with their phones. In the case of NFC, the phones are equipped with NFC readers, and NFC tags are placed in the environment. As the reading distance is short (about 5 centimeters), users can be instructed to touch tags, and the data read from tags can be interpreted as commands. Separate NFC readers are available as well, and the technology supports communication between two NFC readers and readers that emulate tags, but we focus in this paper on NFC phones reading NFC tags placed in the environment

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