Planning for the development of the first smart toys to interact with our up coming MMA Animals mobile game I stumbled across “near field communication” or NFC. NFC allows for simplified transactions, data exchange, and wireless connections between two devices in proximity to each other, usually by no more than a few centimeters.
While looking further into NFC I found some pretty smart guys at +Labs using this technology in a way that really stimulates creative thinking. NFC provided the perfect bridge between object and device as it requires no handshaking, no pairing, and no user setup. In this video their is a cube that is tagged with six different NFC stickers can hold 1k of data. They wrote each tag with plain text that contained a single colour value. In order to read the tags, they built an Android app for the Nexus S that listened for NFC tag discovery and established a connection.
While I don’t think this will be the method that our smart toys use it does make me think about how to integrate a blend of the physical and virtual worlds with some of our marketing materials. This technology could make for a very exciting sticker book. Digging even deeper this technologies is most commonly used with the fast pay services from credit card providers.
To learn more about NFC click here or go to www.nfcworld.com
