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Topaz and Seeing Eye Phone

Topaz™, the NFC Tag from Innovision, enables visually impaired and tourists to shop for groceries in "Most Innovative NFC proposal of 2007"

 

Innovision Research & Technology’s Topaz™ tag is at the heart of a new Near Field Communication (NFC) application that could revolutionise the lives of millions of people who travel abroad or who are visually impaired, by enabling them to obtain spoken information in their language about products and objects around them.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland chose the Topaz NFC tag for its “Seeing-eye-phone” application, which won at Europe’s first NFC Competition, “Touching the Future”, held at the NFC Developers Summit in Monaco in April 2007. The Seeing-eye-phone won Track B “Most Innovative NFC Proposal of the Year 2007”

The system proposed is designed to assist visually impaired consumers or tourists to a foreign country whilst shopping for items in stores. A Topaz NFC tag, containing a product identity code and a web-link to a server providing product specific information, is affixed to the shelf edge adjacent to the relevant product. As the consumer holds their NFC-enabled phone up to the tag corresponding to the desired product, information including price, nutritional data, use-by date and special offers is retrieved from the server database. Rather than being displayed on the screen, this information is converted to speech by the phone’s built-in text-to-speech synthesiser, and played to the consumer through the phone’s speaker in the user’s own language.

The advantage of this approach is that product information could be stored and updated on the retailer’s central information server, enabling the retailer to update information quickly and universally to reflect special offers or price changes without having to change the data on every shelf tag.

NFC Type 1 Topaz offers sufficient storage for a protected, read-only link

The Topaz tag, designed and developed by UK-based Innovision Research & Technology, was mandated last year by the NFC Forum as the type 1 NFC tag. The accessibility and amount of available storage were deciding factors in the choice of Topaz for the Seeing-eye-phone application, as Tapio Matinmikko, a team member from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, explains “This kind of application demands a tag with sufficient storage to offer a protected, read-only link. Type 1 tags meet these requirements.”

Since winning the “Touching the Future” competition, VTT has had a request from a national blind people’s association to develop the application for blind and visually impaired people at home, enabling users to differentiate between products of a similar size and shape, such as regular and decaffeinated coffee.

NFC is set for widespread adoption in a whole range of applications. It makes people’s live easier and more convenient by building on existing systems and human behaviour. It will make accessing new media and content services more intuitive; make it easier to pay for goods and services; easier to discover, synchronise and share information; and easier to use transport and other public services.

Background on NFC tag types

In June 2006, the NFC Forum introduced a standardized technology architecture, initial specifications and tag formats for NFC-compliant devices. These include the NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF) and three initial Record Type Definition (RTD) specifications for smart poster, text and Internet resource reading applications.

In addition, the NFC Forum chose the initial tag formats to cater for the broadest possible range of applications and device capabilities:

  • Type 1 is based on ISO 14443 A and is currently available exclusively from Innovision Research & Technology (Topaz). It has a 96-byte memory capacity
  • Type 2 is also based on ISO 14443 A and is currently available
  • Type 3 is based on FeliCa and is currently exclusively available from Sony. It has a larger memory (currently 2kbyte) and operates at a higher data rate (212 kbit/s)
  • Type 4 is fully compatible with ISO 14443 A/B. A typical type 4 product would offer large memory-addressing capability with write speeds of between 106kbit/s and 424kbit/s.

Types 1 and 2, and Types 3 and 4, are two very different groups, with different memory capacities. There is little overlap in the types of applications they are likely to be used for.

All tag types can be either read/write or read-only, however whilst types 1 and 2 can be switched between states by the user, the read/write state of types 3 and 4 are defined by the manufacturer at the time of manufacture and cannot be changed once in the field.

About the European NFC Competition

Called “Touching the Future”, the first European NFC Competition took place on 18/19 April at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. Launched by the NFC Forum (www.nfc-forum.org) in partnership with the SmartTouch project (www.smarttouch.org), the competition is designed to promote innovation and excellence in NFC service implementations throughout Europe. Sponsors included Nokia, Innovision Research & Technology plc, SmartTouch and the NFC Forum.

Addressing this year’s theme of “The Simplicity of Touch”, 50 high-quality submissions from 13 countries focussed on innovation, commercial potential and usability, as well as the design and implementation of NFC technology. Twenty-one finalists made the final cut and ten awards were handed out; the overall winners – one in each Track, Track A for current NFC solutions and Track B for Most Innovative uses of NFC - and eight runners-up.