The Japanese company Tonchidot has taken tagging in the real world to all-new levels with the creation of the Sekai Camera, a.k.a. “world camera” in Japanese. It’s actually a killer iPhone application that gives you feedback of whatever image you’re tagging in front of you via your iPhone camera viewer. Images, messages, directions, prices, retail info, you name it.
When you start the application, it figures out where you are from the built-in GPS nav on the iPhone, then it can first tell you about what you’re looking at (overlaid from a real-time video), and not only that, you can tag and add more, such as photos, messages, and sounds and send this to your friends.
It’s like pop-up information that you can utilize on the spot, or save and put into your “pocket” and tag, add messages, sound to later and send off to others. It’s a way of bringing the real world into a second-life-like world, finding out more, tweaking it if you want to, and sending it back out
to friends via their phones.
The Sekai Camera in debuted in the flesh at the fashion trade show Rooms in Tokyo last week.