To the uninitiated, NFC is a somewhat obscure yet powerful addition to iPhone and Android phones over the past decade. You can think of NFC as being an invisible QR Code that lives on a very small computer chip that does not require batteries or electricity to work. Similar to a QR Code they allow your phone to ‘do something’ when interacted with. Unlike QR Codes, they are not a visual technology but work by simply having your phone near a physical object with an NFC chip on,inside, or underneath it.
To be 100% honest, NFC also kinda sucks.
On it’s own, NFC is a great hardware technology but doesn’t offer a lot of benefit to the average person without software tools to make it fun. How useful would a RAM chip be without a personal computer to make it do something? So that’s the journey today - I want to briefly highlight *some* of the technology stack we’ve built over these past 4 years, called PixelStix, that makes NFC technology a valuable addition to average people and communities.
Uploading content into everyday objects
The first item we wanted to tackle was to allow someone to upload videos into NFC. In today’s world people are constantly recording videos as a way to document significant experiences in their lives. We wanted to make it easy, via NFC, to simply attach a video from your phone into a physical object. A PixelStix is smart enough to know who uploaded content and that person can always change or even ‘release’ the PixelStix back into the wild. Either way, once the video is there, everyone else that interacts with the PixelStix will now see the video you uploaded.
This has paved the way for an entire arena of ‘smarter’ objects. One of our favorites is the smarter postcard stamp that goes through the mail but also holds a video.
Public Galleries of Content
One of the uses of PixelStix that became apparent early on was how beneficial this was for public art. Since NFC doesn’t require batteries or electricity, one can easily embed an NFC chip into a public space and it will live there for years. Early on, artists starting using our technology to upload videos of their stories or timeline videos of them creating public art. It occurred to us how useful Maps would be so that a person using our app could find all of the locations of digital content related to any particular topic.
This basically launched public art galleries and scavenger hunts like nothing else we’ve ever seen. People now all over the country are adding content to their public art and also adding the location to their Map. People use the Map to find the location of the PixelStix (which is also the same location of the art) and then interact with the art. Unlike QR Codes, since NFC is happy to be embedded into objects, the PixelStix can be underneath the paint or even under a plaque.
This is paving the way for an entirely new era in the Mural Arts Movement, Scavenger hunts, and History tours.
Thank you for reading this article and I hope you will agree with us how useful NFC can be when the right tools are put into peoples hands. On it’s own NFC is just a hardware trick. Software, like PixelStix, is needed to make it relatable to people and their everyday lives.
