Researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University have developed a technology that allows even smartphones that do not support NFC to complete payments by shooting an NFC reader through a camera.
Currently, about half of smartphones either do not have an NFC module or cannot use the NFC function for security reasons. This technology can solve this problem.
Working principle:
Users simply hold their phone’s camera close to the NFC reader, and a specific stripe pattern will appear on the camera’s screen. These stripes are actually codes used for data transmission, and by reading these codes, the same data exchange is possible as NFC.
Technical Inspiration:
This technology is based on a phenomenon in which magnetic fields generated by NFC readers cause harmless magnetic interference (Magnetic Interference, MI) to the phone’s CMOS image sensor. When the phone camera is close to the NFC reader, this magnetic interference creates a stripe pattern similar to a barcode on the camera’s screen.
Performance:
The technology has been tested with 11 different smartphones, all of which have shown very high performance. In particular, compared to magnetic induction-based methods, data transmission is 58 times faster.
Details: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570361.3614079
Video downloaded:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1718806105739215283
