NFC Ring – pay for stuff, unlock doors and share info like a Jedi

Imagine being able to wave your hand to unlock a door or transfer your contact information by simply touching a phone. Sounds pretty cool and Jedi-like huh?  Well, thanks to this Kickstarter-funded near field communication-enabled (NFC) ring, all that could soon be possible.

The NFC Ring will not only allow you to unlock doors but trigger your NFC-enabled tech and even enable you to literally keep your top secret passwords at arm’s length.

Like all great ideas, the NFC Ring is pretty straightforward.

The ring consists of a titanium band and two inlays with NFC-ready chips in them.

There’s a big one on the top of the ring for public information and a smaller one on the inside for storing your private information. This is designed to enable the wearer to use different types of hand gestures in order to share different kinds of information.

What that information might be is totally up the wearer. As suggested above, the NFC signal can perform simple tasks like unlocking a smartphone or your front door. You can store all kinds of personal data including URLs that you want to share with your friends and others – such as your site’s URL when you’re out networking.

It can be programmed to work as your key fob and actually serve as a replacement for your car’s ignition button – this all depends how good the manufacturing and reliability as well the amount of faith you want to put in to this cool bit of wearable tech is, of course.

One of the coolest aspects of the NFC ring project is just how open source creator John McLear has allowed the construction of the rings to be.

In addition to selling the rings for £22 a piece through a Kickstarter, McLear put the CAD files for the ring so people can hack the design and 3D print rings themselves.

For now, the ring will work with an Android app, although it can be hacked to work on Windows and BlackBerry devices.

There’s currently no word on iOS compatibility, but since Apple products don’t have NFC capabilities, there’s no real rush.

Check out the video and let me know what you think 🙂