A total of 52 companies launched at last year’s TechCrunch50 conference. Five of them got jury selection prizes, there was one big winner and a very special crowd pleaser: Japan-based Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera, an iPhone app that presents tagged information in the form of a graphical layer over images in the iPhone camera.
Charismatic CEO Takahito Iguchi delivered a memorable demonstration, making the audience go crazy by fending off questions of TC50 judges such as Tim O’Reilly if Sekai Camera really works with the words “Join us!” or “We have a patent!”. The reason for the skepticism: Iguchi’s on-stage show mainly centered on a pre-produced video clip, not an actual product demo. This left people wondering if Sekai Camera isn’t just vaporware for almost half a year during which it seemed like nothing happened. But today I saw the app is real and working – on an iPhone.
Tonchidot organized an invitation-only event at an exhibition in Tokyo today, showcasing a working prototype for the first time. Sekai Camera’s basic concept is still intact: Use the iPhone camera to overlay tags and information onto any object in the real world. Users then need to look through the camera to see icons pop up that contain information on buildings, stores, sightseeing spots or objects.
The prototype I tried out today was a bit buggy but worked as promised, showing tags with information (sounds, pictures and text) on other booths installed in the exhibition hall. Many people speculated how Sekai Camera works technically. The answer is simple: The user’s location is identified through GPS (no cell-tower triangulation or image recognition technology is being used). As the iPhone doesn’t have an internal compass, the direction of where the viewfinder is pointed at can’t be measured: Users need to flick fingers left or right to find relevant tags that are around them (as demonstrated in the video I took below). Tap a tag and the information it contains appears in the form of a window, for example a picture with a comment box below it or a voice message someone left earlier.
Tonchidot today showed they were rightfully chosen as a TechCrunch50 finalist. Sekai Camera is incredibly cool technology even though the prototype version didn’t look as flashy as the previous one shown on video. For a massive land grab, Sekai Camera will have to come up with a viable business model, achieve a critical mass of tags to make the app worthwhile and optimize the technology.
But Tonchidot is working on it. Iguchi said he is in talks with companies interested in contributing commercial tags that could contain anything from ads, coupons to product information for a fee. Tags are also being scraped from various web services such as Yahoo Japan’s Wai Wai Mappu (a community-style map information service). But Sekai Camera also needs user-generated tags – lots of them. While a compass built into a future iPhone model might solve the directional alignment issue, GPS within buildings will most likely remain a problem for quite some time. (For tagging the exhibition hall today, locations were measured through Wi-Fi signals an external service called PlaceEngine provided.).
According to Tonchidot, Japan will be covered with social tags first, followed by the rest of the world. Asked when Sekai Camera will be available for everyone to buy, Tonchidot fellow Masayuki Akamatsu told me: “In 2009, sometime when it’s warm!”. We will stay tuned.
Fantastic. I knew they’d do it.
Absolutely agree. Sometimes, we just pay too focus on communication barrier instead of in technology it self.
Idea fantastic – technical execution bad. They should at least implement image recognition that can identify floors, walls, ceilings and buildings using a wire-frame model. Like that they could determine the orientation of the user. Waiting for yet another expensive sensor to be built in is not an option. Until then, things will be plastered with tags so hard these tags aren’t of any use anymore. If not, they have an even bigger problem (i.e. not enough users).
TonchiDot’s Sekai Cameria was the cooling thing ever for TC50 but too bad they did not win. I knew they had a solid business plan.
And that solid business plan is… spamming TC, maybe?
Wow … that kind of tech could change everything. The web is placeless. But mobile exists in place and time, which is fundamentally different. If physical reality could aquire a digital historical overlay, there is no limit to the inventions that could be born. (Of course indoors will always be a problem).
I am still skeptic and guess only believe it if I have in in my own hand. Especially here in NY it would be really beneficial though, cannot wait till more developers but their hands on such an app!
this is total crap. I mean the overlay is just random. Imagine what kind of mess is on the screen when you have hundreds of tags in your surroundings (which you will have in the future for sure). It makes the interface only more complicated than needed. If you want just suff and tags from around you use locly or around me on the iPhone. It is easier to use.
If you want to have real augmented reality and tags in the real world, go with some serious image recognition technology like http://www.snaptell.com or http://www.kooaba.com. While they are not there yet, they certainly have better chances to achieve it, since they have the core competency in image recognition. The rest is comparably easy.
Wow, amazing stuff! But like others I am a little skeptical as to how well it works. It seems there is a tremendous amount of room for problems.
While I know this is heresy, I still think the Usability of Microsoft’s new Tag platform has a far better chance of mass use. Any phone with a camera can gain data access to “things,” including SMS and URL lanch. User Generated tagging is dead easy.
The Sekai platform will eventually require Search and Filters to weed out Tags, rather than a targeted solution. I think Sekai is far too cumbersome for the long-term. A gimmick, is just a gimmick….
See: http://tag.micr...com/SignIn.aspx
thats a really bad platform sorry…
try http://www.semapedia.org/
or use a QR code to encode whatever you like works on ALL phones and they do this all the time in japan on adverts…
not dependent on Microsoft servers redirecting you the data is right there in the image !
http://en.wikip...rg/wiki/QR_Code
regards
John Jones
The SEMAPEDIA tags only appear to work with Wikipedia URLs. Maybe I need to dig into “advanced” features, but, it doesn’t appear to have SMS options either, which Microsoft.Tag does.
Who cares if you’re “dependent on Microsoft Servers,” I presume they are more reliable than most and the Tag service is free.
The QR code reference is interesting, but, I prefer plug-and-play – someone else already did the work and the Microsoft Mobile App (at least for Blackberry) is dead-easy.
All this iPhone App elitism is growing tiresome.
Semapedia’s (I am co-founder) purpose was to bring the knowledge from the wikipedia to the real world. That’s why the constraint. But it is very trivial to create QR codes with various libraries or via one of the web generators.
TigTags.com (I am co-founder) provides QR Code/NFC/Datamatrix management and usage analysis.
Regarding the Microsoft Tags, QR codes can be read by any of the already existing QR code readers. The MS Tags can be very tiny, which is great,but keep in mind that they shouldn’t be too small to be recognized and QR codes can simply contain short URLs. The Microsoft Tags are indirect, they always rely on the MS Server where as QR codes are direct and do not need a resolution server.
Can’t the position of the devices accelerometer show which direction it is pointing? I feel like some apps already do this, like the star gazing apps
Looks very similar to Enkin to me – http://googlema...your-phone.html
+1 to wondering what happened to Enkin.
A more useful approach. Did Google buy them out? They’ve gone off the radar for > 1/2 a year
If this is based on GPS, what does it have to do with the camera? Why not just show a list of the tags associated with your location?
The idea is great, but the realization is bad. Essentially it’s nothing more than a list of location-based links. What is all this buzz about?
The best performance at TC50 to date. Besides all the laughter their demo was pretty cool recorded or not. It is cool to hear they have some sort of a working demo model.
What’s the business model exactly? And I assume this works using the location (gps) of all “tagged” people, and requires that they all be running the app at the same time? Obviously this is problematic for the iphone (today).
Yet again, a review of an iPhone app by TechCrunch which uses APIs that are not permitted by the App Store. (How else are they doing real-time video display? The camera API doesn’t allow it.)
This is probably the 5th time I’ve seen a video iPhone app discussed here, with no mention of the fact that they won’t be able to get it into the App Store, unless Apple severely changes their policies.
MGZ
They’re just walking down the view hierarchy for UIImagePickerController to suppress the buttons. There are lots of examples of this in the App Store.
But how are they overlaying new buttons on top of the video? I don’t think that’s possible with the legal API.
They are using a public API to access the camera, so no problem there… Traversing views is allowed (even suggested at times) and overlaying views is standard practice.
Please share some examples of this.
Just look in the Photography category at the App Store for examples; 25Shot, GhostCamera, etc… Virtually all the apps there use the same technique.
There’s some discussion and a sample code here:
http://techzone...ing-iphone-sdk/
Aye!
Wow. That totally kills Nokia Point & Find. Their app sucks ballz.
Clearly nobody has a clean “Augmented Reality” app working yet … but the idea is exciting and so few people even seem to be able to understand the concept.
It is only a matter a time before these companies have polished apps. This is the bleeding edge currently. Once the technology gets worked out, there will be a deluge of invention.
wonderfull…
The idea of place based media and data is a new one and will take a while to catch on. This app uses place based user created data but, because there is no compass, the overlay is not based on specific objects – it’s just a floating list ordered by location with a video background. Still, we’ll find some things do not need to be localized, while others do, including new kinds / combinations of information we haven’t thought of because we are still mostly working & thinking from a desktop web model. This project at least pushes us into thinking about micro local media.
Wow! This is interesting.
Seems quite disapointing. Agree with previous post, this is no more than geolocalized tag/places displayed on top of overlay video.
I think that there was much more innovation with simmilar projects on android, working real thanks to embeeded compass…