Touch

Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. We are developing applications and services that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. Touch consists of an inter-disciplinary team involved in social and cultural enquiry, interaction/industrial design, rapid prototyping, software, testing and exhibitions.

RFID is currently regarded as the replacement for barcodes in logistics and supply chain management. It is also becoming widely used for contactless ticketing, credit cards, animal tracking and e-passports. But a new set of applications and services are opening up as NFC (a new standard based on RFID) is integrated into mobile phones. Commercial applications for NFC are predicted to include ticketing, payments and service discovery, where these things can be achieved with a simple ‘touch’ of the mobile device.

But Touch is not just about incremental innovations to existing infrastructures; the technology offers many unexplored opportunities. The simple integration of tags into everyday things and places, the low-cost of NFC components and the adaptiveness of the NFC specifications are all examples of the ways in which this technology promises to be ubiquitous. These opportunities suggest that many other applications and services will be built around the technology, and that ‘touch’ may well become part of everyday life in unexpected ways.