The future is now- Sekai Camera

It was one of those moments where I felt humbled. One of the those moments where I realized once again that while I may well live in Silicon Valley, there are indeed many more technologically advanced places on the planet. The moment in question took place on my recent tour of the Far East- I’d been spending the first week of the tour in Japan talking to various companies about Adobe’s Open Screen Project of which ARM is an active member. All-in-all it was well received and there was a lot of enthusiasm around the concept of applications being no longer PC bound, that could scale across multiple devices and allow collaboration via the Cloud. This was also the first week I had started using my iPhone and I had been enthusiastically geotagging my Tweets to allow recipients to see where I was Twittering along with pictures on Twitpic. (If you want to know where you can drink 20 year old coffee in the Ginza check it out).

As the week drew to a close I sat in the office with my Japanese colleague going over all the collateral I had put together over the past year around Web 2.0 technologies on mobile devices. He listened attentively, asking a lot of good questions and I felt I had new convert to my vision of the future Web; a world which will see the collision of multiple technologies from massively multiplayer “serious” gaming, Web n.0, location-based social networking and ambient computing to provide users with a significantly enhanced view of their surroundings through their mobile device. My captive audience of one sighed politely (as the Japanese do so well) and quietly said “Oh, you mean like Sekai Camera?”

“Like what?”

“I think that is what Sekai Camera is doing here in Japan already. It will tag everything and allow you to hold up your iPhone to buildings, objects and people and see additional attributes of them.”

I was stunned and as I have said humbled by this revelation. The technology of Sekai Camera is definitely headed in exactly the direction I have been thinking about, but I hadn’t realized just how far ahead Japan had gotten. Upon reflection a society of over 100 Million people condensed into a relatively small (in US terms) area is the exactly the place where this kind of project can prove itself. America is simply too big and spread out for a pilot, (although Google is certainly doing a good job with more rudimentary technologies around mapping).

Sekai Camera started out targeting the iPhone exclusively, but last week they announced that it would be available on Android as well.