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Pompidou turns to NFC, Facebook to attract teens

Consequences of kids Googling 'teen gallery' not considered

France's Pompidou Centre is opening a "Teen Gallery" next year, with NFC tags on every exhibit and the inevitable Facebook connection to draw in Paris youth.

The idea is to put tags beside every exhibit, so punters can wave their phone nearby to get more information on the artist and work. But even the French won't have NFC handsets by next year so the Centre is going to hand them out in the hope that youth will upload comments to their own Facebook pages, all in the interests of getting young Parisians to talk about art.

Sagem will be providing the handsets, which have an NFC module to interact with tags around the exhibits and be able to download additional information. More crucially the custom application allows the user to make comments about the work which are then uploaded to their own Facebook account, along with a link to the artist's other work and information about the Gallery.

Mauricio Estrada-Muñoz, project manager for youth at the centre, told RFID Journal: "We will be the first institution with a gallery specific for teenagers", which is arguable, but it's probably the first one with a Facebook connection.

And the idea is probably quite a good one, though the use of RFID might be overkill for something that could equally-well be done with a QR Code. But a project using such old technology wouldn't qualify for a grant from the French Government's department of industry, not to mention free handsets from Sagem, so the technology gets shoehorned in regardless of the alternatives available. ®

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