Old NFC video still more advanced than NFC today

NFC isn’t new and has been trolling around for nearly ten years. Its cousin, RFID, has been about a lot longer. In 2009, MIT released a video that followed a day with NFC as a central part of life. Showing the utilization MIT imagined we would be using by now the video follows two students throughout their day illustrating use cases for NFC using a phone as both  initiator and a target,  NFC tags are shown for collecting information and as part of a menu for a sandwich shop.

NFC uses shown in the video

The video shows a photograph containing a passive tag which is programmed to call the person in the photograph. The video also shows a full bus timetable at a bus stop which allows passengers to immediately see when the next bus to their destination will be. Mobile-to-mobile payments are also illustrated, as is professional networking via LinkedIn and social networking through a site like Facebook. Back in 2009, MIT was also envisaging NFC being able to help track carbon footprints and count calories at the gym.

Like the Oyster Card in London, the students used near field communications capabilities to pay for fares and get through barriers on the “T” in Boston and also used their phones to gain access to locked doors, using NFC to authenticate the lock like a key. If you have been caught up in NFC as a payments method, it can be easy to forget the sheer amount of uses and potentials that the technology has to offer. If nothing else, this video brings us back to raw NFC – enjoy.

NFC future?

What we would love to see is how MIT’s vision of near field communications has changed and if they shot another video that featured a day in the life of NFC what they would see as the use cases now.