Hasta La Gadget!

The digital lifestyle application in development from Tonchidot, makes its first public appearance in Japan at the fashion trade show Rooms.

Tonchidot’s “Sekai Camera” made its Japanese debut in the most unusual place: at Tokyo fashion trade show Rooms. While the Japanese creators have presented this iPhone application to “tag the real world” at noteworthy expos overseas (like TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco), they had yet to demonstrate it in their home country.

To catch you up, Sekai Camera (“world camera” in Japanese) is an Augmented Reality iPhone application in development that offers users “pop-up” information about their surroundings, as viewed through the camera screen. Touch any of the approaching icons to pull up the corresponding information into the frame or drop it into your “pocket” for later. Put simply, it’s a kind of Second Life spatial interaction for your, err, first life.

Visitors to a space can also tag the place themselves through comments, photos, and eventually voice recordings, viewed by friends or the public depending on filter settings.

But returning to the first point—it was the fashion industry that got a sneak peak of this future-forward technology. More specifically Rooms is a high-profile, yet invitation only, trade show attended by thousands of buyers, designers, and press. Nonetheless these are professionals who, by reputation, are typically more interested in things more tangible and less tech-y.

Trend Potential

We have been covering the increasing convergence of fashion retail and digital lifestyle trends for some time. To read the rest of this review with more depth, as well as connections to similar trends, you’ll find it all in the Trendpool.

We’ve got ourselves some video of MIT’s new “sixth sense” project, which really helps explain the concept. MIT basically plans to augment reality with a pendant picoprojector: hold up an object at the store and the device blasts relevant information onto it (like environmental stats, for instance), which can be browsed and manipulated with hand gestures. The “sixth sense” in question is the internet, which naturally supplies the data, and that can be just about anything — MIT has shown off the device projecting information about a person you meet at a party on that actual person (pictured), projecting flight status on a boarding pass, along with an entire non-contextual interface for reading email or making calls. It’s pretty interesting technology, that, like many MIT Media Lab projects, makes the wearer look like a complete dork — if the projector doesn’t give it away, the colored finger bands the device uses to detect finger motion certainly might. There are patents already in the works for the technology, which the MIT folks have been working on “night and day” for the past four months, and we’re guessing (and hoping) this isn’t the last we’ll see of this stuff. Video is after the break.

Continue reading MIT’s “sixth sense” augmented reality device demonstrated on video

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

MIT’s “sixth sense” augmented reality device demonstrated on video originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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