Switching the Role of NFC Tag and Reader for the Implementation of Smart Posters

Benefits and opportunities of NFC technology have been discussed for many years. Continuous promises of handset manufacturers to embed this technology into their series of devices anytime soon have been fulfilled only partly so far. Contrasting with that, research and practice have outlined a number of applications that yield great attention among users. Among these applications are Smart Posters. However, the prevailing low market penetration of NFC-equipped smart phones poses a barrier for the implementation of many Smart Poster scenarios. Accordingly, for certain scenarios this paper proposes to switch the role between fixed tags and mobile phones by affixing mobile phones to posters and hand out the much cheaper tags to the users instead. The paper describes the approach and shows its feasibility by reporting lessons learned of a case study.