Near Field Communication or NFC for short, has become one of the hottest developing technologies in the global mobile economy. NFC allows a user to tap their phone or device to make purchases, exchange info, or check in with social networking sites.

NFC itself has been around since 2002, but with the explosion of smartphones like the iPhone and the Nexus S, the market has started to see real movement in adoption of the technology. Developers and manufacturers alike are scrambling to find ways to make NFC useful for actions beyond payments.

One of the areas that makes the most sense is some type of augmented reality gaming using NFC tags to create scenarios for entertainment. Nokia has just released information and playable games that take advantage of NFC on its NFC-enabled Symbian handsets.

Using NFC cards from online retailers, or even an ID badge or other NFC chipped piece of identification, users can interact with a few simplistic games right now. The titles include a matching game where instead of using your hands to flip cards, the picture on the card appears on the screen of the phone. The handset tracks the user’s matches and keeps score.

What is interesting is that while a player is interacting with the cards, there is more than one device involved, as each player has their own device.  The units talk to each other during the game, keeping each apprised of the progress of the other users. Nokia very smartly is keeping children in mind as they develop for NFC. The company is also offering a spelling based game, where players tap out words with their phones in an effort to create as many as possible from a specific letter set, much like the game Boggle.

A less impressive NFC game that Nokia is developing is a teddy bear based app, where you “play” by tapping the phone on different parts of the teddy’s body in the order your handset tells you. It’s not something that is going to wow users, but certainly shows proof of concept for using multiple NFC chips that build actions off each other.

Below is a video of the Nokia NFC games in action. It will be interesting to see if they can take the games to a level where they appeal to the mass market, and do it in time for their Windows Phone devices.

via: Nokia Beta Labs