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Advent calendar is a traditional method to count days in anticipation of
Christmas. The advent calendar has 24 doors which are opened once per day from
1st of December until Christmas Eve. Behind the doors can be picture or more
elaborate advent calendars can have a small gift concealed behind each door,
such as a chocolate item or a toy.
We, at VTT, decided to try out how NFC would work in this context and after
trialing it inside our company we were pleased to find how nicely it worked.
It worked so well that we decided to spread the Christmas spirit and let you
also give it a try. We provide the graphics to be printed, and you need to
have the NFC phone (Nokia 6212 classic) and tags. When you have the printed
calendar, fasten the NFC tags on the opposite (white) side i.e back of the
calendar in positions where the doors are.
Next, write the tag information to the tags using your mobile phone. Look at
our Install guide how to do that. Here you need
to be a bit geek.
The Advent calendar works by touching the current day number with your NFC
phone. The phone recognizes the tag behind number and asks user to open the
url address tag provides. Next VTT server is contacted. When web page download
completes user will see door opening animation. Behind the door is a picture,
a sound or an animation. After a while the phone will tell if the user has won
in the gift lottery or not. If user did win, a word will be displayed on the
screen that entitles to collect the gift from a designated person in return
for the word. In our case the gift was collected from the receptionist who had
the gifts and word list to compare.
The NFC advent calendar has a built-in gift lottery system. Purchase some
gifts to potential winners. The lottery is random, but the amount of winners
from 100 opened calendar doors is about 9.
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