GAMES

Near Field Creatures

Using the inbuilt NFC (Near Field Chip) readers that had just started to become common in mobile devices (circa 2012), this app scanned student id cards, credit cards, or anything else with a chip and turned it into an adorable pet for you to collect!

The unique identifier on each NFC chip will always be read as the same creature, so if your student card is a lion on your phone, it will be on everyone else's too. Users are encouraged to gently tease those represented by a slug, after collecting it for themselves of course.

The idea was to encourage people to socialise with lots of different people in order to fill up their Near Field with Creatures and provide a conversation starter around what animal everyone is assigned.

If taken any further than a fun appathon entry, I'm sure there would be lots of issues around scanning items which contain sensitive information like bank details and personal identifiers. Even though our app only looked at the id number of the chip, we still limited it to student id cards for the day.