Nintendo have unveiled plans to release plastic figurines that are compatible with multiple software titles on Nintendo platforms.
It's easy to see from where Nintendo have gotten their inspiration, but naturally their platform and how they've designed this to work across different titles with no real barriers (you don't need extra peripherals, like say portals) means that this can be widely adopted.
Mario was used as the showcase piece, but Nintendo have a rich gallery of characters to draw from and hopefully we'll also see third-parties being able to take advantage of this in some way.
Here's an interesting quote:
"NFP has a writer function as well as a reader function, so it can not only tell what character figurine is on the Wii U GamePad, but also a compact amount of data unique to each game can be written into it and read from it. That is to say, you will be able to customize your NFP to raise or train your own Nintendo characters, for example."
Did someone say, Pokémon? Again, it's clear that Skylanders have been an inspiration.
Nintendo will announce their first NFP products at E3, and perhaps this is the "new hardware" that there was rumours about last week? Clearly, it's not hardware, but from a retail perspective they'd be selling physical "peripherals" in a way.