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Photos: Smart posters and the 'seeing eye phone'
A vision of an NFC-enabled future...

By Natasha Lomas

Published: Friday 04 April 2008

Near field communications (NFC) technology company Innovision, has been showing off its vision of a future where low-cost stick-on NFC tags can turn any object into a 'smart object' - allowing mobile users to 'physically browse' their environment by holding the phone against tagged items.

Innovision is one of the companies involved in O2's six-month Oyster mobile wallet trial in London, which kicked off back in November.

Pictured above is a prototype of the 'Seeing eye phone' - so called as it is designed to help visually impaired people who are unable to read product information in shops.

The NFC tag on the shelf contains product-specific data which the NFC-enabled phone can read once it is held up to the tag. The phone then receives the product info as text, which is then translated to synthesised speech by the phone. The prototype was developed by engineers from VTT at the Technical Research Centre of Finland as part of a SmartTouch EU-project.

Photo credit: Innovision