Alcatel-Lucent announced a competition led by its Touchatag venture where software developers compete to create an innovative NFC urban game for mobile phones. Competition winners will receive a total of more than $7,200 in cash prizes.
Called the “Vienna Jungle Scrum,” the competition is one component of mobilkom austria’s A1 InnovationDays 2009, taking place on September 26 and 27, and is intended to motivate developers around the world to create new mobile applications using NFC technology. The competition challenges designers and software developers to use the city of Vienna as a backdrop to create an urban game.
Urban gaming is a fast growing trend made possible by mobile technologies, such as Global Positioning Services and NFC. Sometimes called location-based games, the games use widespread urban spaces for play. Games can vary from fast-paced point-to-point races, to treasure hunts and problem solving challenges, to interactive tours of historical, cultural and other points of interest.
Touchatag aims to make urban gaming more exciting by providing a simple form of augmented reality: places, people and things can be linked to online information via NFC tags that can then be read with an NFC-enabled phone.
The Vienna Jungle Scrum challenge is sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent. Registration is open to software developers until September 18. Complete details about the competition, rules and selection criteria as well as how to register for the challenge, can be found here. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/nfcnews-4.gif)
