Near Field Communication
Wireless in the World: a video produced by Touch/Timo Arnall, a research project investigating NFC (near field communication).
Through the nearfield project, they are developing ways to map and visualize the radio space of personal and public objects. As these invisible volumes and hertzian zones are revealed, it is only natural that designs will begin to reflect their existence. Mobile phones are being released with NFC capability, promoting an even smarter and comprehensive mobile lifestyle.
While the influence of mobile technology and the wireless city can often propagate assemblages of isolated individuals making distributed connections across the global web, devices with near field communication introduce the potential to transform our immediate space through localized, invisible connections with the objects around us. In addition to providing elsewhere places and elsewhere connections, our mobile phones could become the very things to reunite us with our physical environments. It’s not uncommon to witness two people sharing an ipod on the subway or browsing digital photos from a camera’s lcd, but could near field communication present new opportunities for collectivity? It seems as if the technology is largely focused on creating new interactions with objects or between objects (ie. the mobile phone as payment device), however the possibility for new methods of interaction between people could be essential, and maybe is already integral to these object-based developments. Could the localized nature of NFC objects shrink zones of personal space, or will their ‘nearness’ promote just the opposite, as immediate contact becomes negligible?
