sites that people already hold their phone out to
- credit card readers via contactless payment
- transit
- entering secured entrances
have to make something that invites exploration, two directions
- place phone and leave it
- tap phone only, site that invites tapping
NFCs have a poor history of use but are increasingly growing popular now and I suspect will continue to gain adoption because Apple is doing a big Apple Pay push. People are getting more used to the concept of tapping your phone (although it still feels like magic when it’s not in some “official” capacity like purchases or transit).
This forms the research base to create computing shrines.
I made my ceramic NFC-powered name stamp finally, and it works!! Although it got stuck to the glaze because the studio workers glazed it on the wrong side, I managed to get it loose, put in the NFC chip, and sealed up the hole with epoxy putty from my kintsugi kit, and we have a finished piece!
It feels really compelling to have a tangible “worry stone” that is my literal website. I was talking with humphrey the other day about embedding more computing and data local to a specific geographic location.
E-ink and NFC
There is a very small novel category of e-ink screens that use NFC to power them, which means they have no battery. The e-ink screen receives the power to change its screen solely through the NFC wireless transmission. This is crazy because it means you can program it just like you can program an NFC but you also have a battery-less screen to go with it. The only ones I’ve seen are from waveshare which leverages a proprietary app to “write” to the screen. Unfortunately I think this means it would be incredibly difficult to do what I want to do which is to try embedding these in public places as communally-maintained logs of visiting and having the screen change in response. (I guess water protection and general resilience to weather is a problem here huh..).