Stanford Researchers Bring NFC into Reach of Social Apps
When Google first introduce Near-Field Communication (NFC) it has been lauded as a platform for financial transactions and advertisement; but these two business-practical applications only represent a sliver of how the technology could be used. Researchers at Stanford’s MobiSocial lab have brainstormed other ideas of what they could do with the technology and now there’s some videos of them demoing their work.
According to an article on Engadget on the subject, they’ve tweaked the Android Gingerbread software on the Samsung Nexus S (the only Google phone to currently sport NFC) so that it could be used for social applications like sharing photos or enabling a collaborative whiteboard.
In both cases the NFC either enables a connection or transfers data when the phones are touched together. As NFC is intended for bursts of data rather than streams, the tapping of the phones triggers the NFC burst to transfer connection information between the phones and the rest is likely handled by the phone’s data connection.
The first video demos an application that enables a sort of collaborative whiteboard using a library called Junction. The tap between the phones trade the connection information via NFC; then the phones hand off the handshake information to the Junction library, and the whiteboard software does the rest with the data connection.
Next we see the phones trade connection information via NFC through the bump and one researcher sends the other an image of a cat via the data connection.
No doubt, these functions can also be done via BlueTooth already; but it leads the way for forward thinking of how NFC might be used in order to enable communication and interaction between phones. In fact, the capability to trade and accept information in this fashion might enable trading place information, business cards, chain-letters that keep track of how far they’ve travelled, and so on. Interaction enabled connections between phones could have endless applications when it comes to social apps.
We just have to see more developers get into the game and to do that we’ll have to see more phones with NFC technology embedded.
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