A research team has developed a technique that gives your furniture NFC functionality. Nice, but why?
Near Field Communication (NFC) has recently made a lot of things a lot easier. Especially with your smartphone. NFC, for example, is the technology that allows you to pay contactless with your smartphone. There are other types of technology that can make NFC fun, but that will take a while.
NFC in your furniture
For example, a research team at WiTech has now found a funny application for NFC: in your furniture!
The video above shows how it works, you can respond to your devices by touching the sofa. Nice technique in itself.
Why?
However, the more interesting question is: why do you want NFC in your furniture? For example to control external devices… with your couch! For example, you could put light buttons under your sofa cushions so that you can press the sofa to turn on your light. This is already possible with NFC, but what makes WiTech’s work interesting is that it can be integrated into cushions by weaving it into the fabric. This way you can build all this into your sofa and your furniture is suddenly useful, without it looking different.
Found objects
In addition to NFC in your furniture, you can also put an NFC chip in other everyday objects. Then NFC would suddenly work like a kind of Apple AirTag: you could then easily locate those objects and add them to your smart home system, for example. So it’s really about making all your everyday stuff ‘smarter’. You don’t expect it!
What will happen with the technology is of course not yet known. It sounds like a nice addition to objects, without changing them substantially. We’d love to see more. (through WiTech Lab)
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