chrispeng [ad_1]
A group of monks living in a 13th-century Czech monastery are now using near field communication RFID technology to provide visitors with recorded messages in their native language. The designer of this system said that this may be one of the first NFC application cases in the tourism industry.
Every year, tens of thousands of travelers from all over the world come to Vyooí Brod Cistercian Abbey to visit the cathedral, chapel and grounds of the monastery. For safety reasons and considering the precious historical sites of the temple, tourists must visit in teams. If there is no guide, it must be accompanied by a monk. Usually the visiting team is composed of tourists from all over the world, many of whom do not understand the Czech language, or the tour guide does not speak the native language of the tourists (in the off-season, sometimes there is no guide that can speak the appropriate language).
Medieval monuments Vyooí Brod Cistercian Abbey
This situation has caused trouble for the five monks in the monastery. The monastery was closed for 40 years during the Communist rule of the country. Now the main source of income for monks is tourism. They need to stabilize the flow of tourists to maintain their daily lives, and Pay for site maintenance (during the Communist rule, the monastery was unmaintained and became deserted and scattered).
To this end, the Association for the Support of the Cistercian Monastery Vyooí Brod, an association for supporting monks and their monasteries, sought a simple solution to provide tourists with information on their mother tongue.
The head of the association Klaus Zerbs contacted NFC solution provider Nexperts, hoping that NFC technology can solve the problem of monks. Nexperts set out to design a set of plans, which cost approximately US$24,000. The association applied for sponsorship from the European Union, and finally the monks received $17,000 in funding from the European Regional Cooperation (ETC) project.
Nexperts initially considered using NFC mobile phones to provide passengers with information. However, the company believes that for this application, the battery life of the NFC mobile phone is not enough, and it will be easy to suffer when dropped. To this end, the company cooperated with the Berlin equipment manufacturer Cruso, who provided the museum with equipment for text, image and audio information. The two companies collaborated to install NFC RFID readers on Cruso devices.
NFC RFID reader
Some Cruso devices can upload visit tickets, etc., and provide GPS functions. According to Zerbs, the monastery may add this feature later.
Visitors rent an NFC device (20 in total), choose the language they want, and then approach an NFC contact point (15 in total)-an insulated disk 20 cm wide with pictures of the temple printed on it. The disk contains a 13.56 MHz passive RFID tag that complies with the NFC standard. The audience waved the Cruso device in front of the touch point, and the device displayed multimedia information of the landscape near the touch point.
Kurd Schmid, president of Nexperts, said that this system simplifies the process of acquiring multiple landscape information in the temple and makes the user experience very unique. Moreover, the strong contrast between modern technology and historical background is very impressive.
“The implementation effect of this plan is very good. We now have four languages and will add four more in the future, which means that the monastery’s income has stabilized,” Zerbs said.
[ad_2]
