Reach out and touch: using NFC and 2D barcodes for service discovery and interaction with mobile devices

  • Authors:
  • Eamonn O'Neill;Peter Thompson;Stavros Garzonis;Andrew Warr

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK;Vodafone Group R&D, Newbury, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK

  • Venue:
  • PERVASIVE'07 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Pervasive computing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We investigate the use of 2 tagging technologies: Near Field Communication (NFC) and 2-dimensional barcodes. Our investigation combined a field trial and interview based study with an experimental evaluation. The field trial focused on users' experience of the usability of NFC for a range of trial services, users' perceptions of NFC use in their daily life context, and users' suggestions for potential applications of NFC. The tags were embedded in a variety of postcards, table-top signs and posters. The experimental evaluation compared the ease of use of NFC and 2D barcodes, operationalised in terms of time taken to read a specified sequence of tags on posters. We found that for untrained users the 2D barcodes were quicker to use than the NFC tags but that training significantly improved users' performance with the NFC tags while having no effect on their performance with the barcodes.