On the road to Bandol

This week is WIMA’s week, so the NFC community will get all excited with lots of things, hopefully just as exciting for the rest of us. In the meantime, here’s a funny article from The Register. The sad part is that the iPhone is twice as big with the NFC adapter(don’t expect this extension to become the best-selling one anytime soon). The good part is that the application in the video shows how exciting NFC can be, at least when the phone acts as a reader.

What the video shows is really simple: when you wave the iPhone close to a little toy, a specific video is shown. That particular application is quite limited, but it shows very interesting possibilities:

• Trigger an action from the context. a RFID tag is the easiest way to trigger an action from a given context. If you wave your NFC phone close to a tagged object, it launches a specific action. This could lead to not-so-useful gadgets (imagine the little mailman toy that opens your e-mail application), as well as more useful ones (imagine a tag on a fridge that starts your shopping application). I am sure you can all find a better one; I didn’t try very hard.
• Provide a user interface to your objects. This is a simple variation on the previous idea, which could be interesting for any kind of IP-connected object. This category of objects is becoming more common, and covers a wide variety of things, including for instance thermostats. If you add a small tag on the thermostat, then when you wave your NFC phone next to it, you can trigger the thermostat’s interface, either by connecting directly to it or by connecting to an external application that manages it ((Or actually, by launching the dedicated iPhone application, since most manufacturers of IP-connected devices already provide a dedicated iPhone interface.)).

All of this is extremely basic, and definitely not new, but I must agree that making this feature available on an iPhone could be very valuable to the NFC community, at least because it would unleash the creativity of the iPhone developer community, and I am sure that they would find way better applications than fridges and climate control.