Concept of Proximity Gaming with NFC : Stakes and strategies in RIM Blackberry

NFC (Near Field Communication) technology is already used progressively in some applications like mobile payment, magnetic cards, computer game … Amongst RIM Blackberry, the strategy on computer game is to use NFC in two places.

here are some screen shots from the proof of concept game, from the BlackBerry 10 version of the game:

 Firstly, players would have to touch devices to start a game, and secondly, they’d touch devices to indicate “it’s your turn now”. Here is their experience and vision about it.

‘’We had to consider a few issues regarding the implementation. It was immediately apparent that we’d have to pass some kind of message from device A to device B and that we’d probably need several message types. In other words, we’d need a simple protocol.

We could also see several technical ways of sending a message from one device to another. We could use virtual target emulation in theory, or maybe we could use one of the two NFC peer-to-peer APIs, SNEP (Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol) or LLCP (Logical Link Control Protocol).

We dismissed target emulation and focused on the peer-to-peer options, since this was clearly a peer-to-peer scenario. We concluded that either SNEP or LLCP could be used, but that SNEP would be a little easier to work with ,LLCP being a lower-level connection-oriented protocol whereas SNEP is a higher-level message-oriented protocol. We’d worked with both in the past, so we had a pretty good feel for what the coding would be like.

In conclusion, we decided to invent a simple message-oriented protocol and use SNEP as the NFC protocol, which would transport game messages between devices. The UI design was to be basic: an initial screen that prompted players to touch devices to start a new game; a screen for “player 1” to choose either noughts or crosses; and the main game screen upon which to place noughts and crosses.

We also decided to implement the game for both BlackBerry® 7 OS using Java®, and our BlackBerry® 10 Dev Alpha devices using C++/Qt/Cascades. Being able to play the game between a BlackBerry 7 device and a BlackBerry 10 device would be a nice proof of the interoperability of NFC between generations of BlackBerry technology.’’