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DiggWith Near Field Communication (NFC) popping up in the news on an almost daily basis, it may finally be time to wonder when the great promise of every Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) might start impacting our daily lives. Significantly.
Sure, RFID has been used in the past to tag cattle (much to the disgust of certain Amish farmers) but for the regular Joe Shmos out there, when and how can we expect to see the technology manifest itself in any sort of useful fashion?
Take the supermarket, for example. How long before one can simply fill up one’s cart with RFID tagged goods, pass through an NFC pay station and leave with minimal delays or fiddling about with cash or credit cards.
After all, “contactless” technology should work as advertised, and imagine how much more efficient shopping trips would become. Think “fast-lane” payment at gas stations or toll stops, and you’ll see we’re already using that kind of technology in some places, so why not roll it out rapidly to others?
It’s a relatively simple path towards integrating RFID tags into product packaging, much like barcodes. After that, all a supermarket would need is a fixed RFID reader located anywhere in the supermarket, connected up to a user-operated pay station, and a second fixed RFID reader located near the exit.
For those with NFC enabled phones, payment would be enabled automatically as one left the supermarket (with the receipt being forwarded by email) and for those still attached to cash and cards, they could either swipe or insert bills at a pay station near the exit.
To exit the supermarket, a second RFID detector would ensure the contents of the trolley hadn’t changed and the door would open, allowing the shopper a speedy exit.
Sure, this is bad news for supermarket check-out people, but the supermarket saves money and space, and might be able to create new jobs for tech support people, and the odd conventional check out assistant in case anything goes wrong. It’s also a real time saver for consumers.
The costs of implementing the technology are relatively low, and most mobile phones are getting NFC over the next year anyway, so we’re hoping we’ll be able to shop the hi-tech way very soon indeed.
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Please do more research prior to publication next time. Your article is not accurate, nor a true depiction of how RFID works. NFC, as you mention, does not work anywhere near what you describe above.
it’s a blog post which explores the future possibilities for digital shopping. If you wanted to write a good comment, you would specify what exactly was wrong with it instead of being vague and unhelpful.
Sylvie,
I agree with informed reader, though they were quite vague. I will try to provide my opinion on the subject as an RFID engineer. In my opinion, this is absolutely not an application that can be handled by NFC for a few reasons, most notably range, tag cost, and metal.
HF(13.56MHz) tags generally do not acheive great enough range to detect them reliably at the door exit. A tag the size of a credit card can attain about a 1.5m gap between gate antennas. Tags this size will not be possible for all products. Smaller tags will acheive much less range. Also, systems capable of reaching this range are quite costly.
HF(13.56MHz) tags that can operate with NFC phones are in the range of 15-20 cents even in high volume. Price will come down some in the future, but its unlikely to be low cost enough to tag everything. For such an application to work, every item in the store must be tagged, right?
Metal causes detuning of tags which reduces or kills the range. Special metal mount tags are available, but costly and larger. How do you tag canned goods? Similary, metal will shield RFID tags. Once customers figure this out, all they have to do to get through the door detector without it going off is find the RFID tag on the product and shield it with aluminum foil.
Hopefully, this is a more useful explanation of why this is not really a feasible application for NFC.
Thank you Ed, that actually was really helpful, and interesting.
In your opinion, is there a technology that we’d be able to use for some sort of self check-out/automatic payment or are we stuck with long lines at check-outs forever?
I agree with the informed readers. Although NFC is finally taking off and will become in the mid-term the biggest and most broadly used RFID application, it is true it cannot perform all those things mentioned in the article… yet.
I do, however, think that this will not necessarily be a roadblock for UHF RFID (the one capable of doing these things). There are already dual tags (HF + UHF) on their way, which in my opinion will have to become an interesting option now that NFC is bringing such power to consumers, where RFID will soone or later tend to.