The popularity of Skylanders and Disney Infinity hasn't gone unnoticed by Nintendo. Using near-field communication (NFC) technology, those two games have allowed customers to purchase toys and scan them into their respective games to be played with digitally. At today's financial results briefing, Nintendo revealed their plans to create NFC figurines based on Nintendo characters for use in multiple games.

Dubbed the NFC Featured Platform (NFP), this initiative will include multiple figurines of various Nintendo characters, which can be scanned in through the Wii U GamePad's NFC technology or a 3DS infrared/NFC transmitter (shown in the briefing). These figurines will be usable in multiple games and interact with them in various ways. According to analystDavid Gibson, Nintendo demonstrated the NFP by showing a Mario figurine interacting with multiple games.

Those looking to get their hands on the figurines will have to wait. Iwata said that the figurines would be compatible with specific Wii U games by the end of the year and future 3DS games next year. Those release windows are presumably for Japan only, but the company expects to show NFP figurines and games at E3 next month.

Also announced at the briefing was a smartphone and PC service named Mario Kart TV, to connect with upcoming Wii U racer Mario Kart 8. Mario Kart TV will allow users to check on their friends' status and watch Mario Kart 8 race footage uploaded to the service.

Reverse Augmented Reality - wha? It's NFC.

AR would imply something within some field of vision....

Some NFC is used like Reverse AR.

You can use a real life object (with NFC in it) to place into the game world, like the Wii U Pokémon Rumble game.

There is no such thing as reversed AR, stop inventing silly new concepts that dont mean anything. Lets just call things by their names, it's NFC.

Pokemon, yes. But Mario? Eh.

They should do some games for little girls featuring the princesses.

Well, I heard of it from a bunch of different Nintendo Blog sites back in 2012 and/or 2013.

That title is just............

Kaizar, you might want to edit that title. This is big news and I think the wording confuses the topic.

@OP: I have a feeling I'm going to have a lot less money this time next year.

(Homer): got ya, wink wink.

(Marge): homer, you said wink wink out loud.

(Homer): D'oh!

If Nintendo creates a hub game that can reach out and interact with a lot of their first party games through figures, I think this could work really well...We'll just have to wait until E3 to see what they are planning