Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Update on Tonchidot's Sekai Camera, geotagging and augmented reality

With Black Friday just around the corner, I was inspired to update you on Tonchidot's progress with the Sekai Camera, an iPhone application. Tonchidot's application provides an "augmented reality" for its users via social geotagging. Essentially, the app is  a more intimate version of a GPS, to guide you on your daily shopping habits and routines

As the tc50 demo video showed, the Sekai Camera can guide its users through their daily route with instant visual feedback regarding objects within sight of the iPhone camera lens, such as electronic products,landmarks,directories,attractions,restaurants and stores.
While the official launch date for the app hasn't been announced, we're starting to learn more about the technology behind it.

At the Techcrunch 50 conference this september, Tonchidot was reluctant to provide many details about the technology behind the recognition software, but a recent post at TechCrunch,titled, "Tag the world-one Tweet,Yelp and Flickr at a time," included this revealing piece:
 

Every geo-coded Tweet, Flickr photo, or restaurant review is adding a tag or comment to the world that is then searchable by others. It is what will make visions like Tonchidot's Sekai Camera a reality.

Evidently, sekai camera would tap into those sources flickrvision will tap into the tagging sources from these networks and to present it in a virtual world interface. Imagine the data from flickrvision combined with user-based input to provide Sekai Camera users with instant visual information regarding their immediate surroundings,literally at their fingertips. It sounds like something out of a dream, but Tonchidot is on the brink of putting that technology right in your hand.

Posted By Matt O'Hern at 03:25 PM
Permanent Link: Update on Tonchidot's Sekai Camera, geotagging and augmented reality | Comments (2)

(2) Comments on Update on Tonchidot's Sekai Camera, geotagging and augmented reality

Not so fast. While geotagging definitely helps to develop variety of geo-aware applications, Sekai Camera needs much more than that to work as described. First of all, most of the mobile phone GPS systems are not very accurate, you may be looking at across the street building geo-tagged as the one behind you, never mind the product on a shelf in a store. Secondly, there should be an accurate image recognition-geotag algorithm, which can associate the image on the screen with the actual product being "tweetted" about.

Comments by Mav : Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 04:46 PM

in reply to Mav : Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 04:46 PM
The iphone 3gs' gps has an acuracy on average of within five feet. The surrounding area does change things, and things like radio towers can interfere with it. I have tested augmented reality on the iphone and it does work. Also most of the up and coming apps do have some form of image recognition built into the augmented reality.

Comments by caz : Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 04:39 PM

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