Popular Japanese augmented reality application, Sekai Camera lets you comment on anything around you
Tonchidot's Sekai Camera iPhone application has
officially launched
in the App store here in the US and the rest of the world. I've been
watching this startup for a while now and excited to see the
application is available for free, for all of us to give a shot.
A
little run down on Tonchidot. The small startup based out of Tokyo is
the developer of an augmented reality application called
Sekai Camera.
The application overlays information on top of what you're viewing on
your iPhone through its camera. Instead of focusing on navigation, as
several other iPhone apps have done in the past, Sekai Camera is all
about 'tagging' the physical world. The app was
launched in Japan
on September 24th, 2009 and saw quite a bit of success. It reached
100,000 downloads which is about 10% of all the iPhones in Japan in a
matter of four days. Tonchidot said it has become one of the most
downloaded apps in Japan and was selected the as the Best App of 2009
by Apple Japan. Just a few weeks ago,
Tonchidot landed $4 million in funding.
Sekia
Camera is focused on letting users communicate through digital tags
that float in the real world. For example, users can go to a cafe,
take photos, leave comments about what the best thing on the menu is,
leave voice notes at the cafe, and all of these can be accessed by the
next person that goes in there and turns on their Sekia Camera. These
notes show up on the screen as little bubbles you can access while
pointing your iPhone around the location.
Another
feature is a Sekai Life-stream which shows up for your friends so they
can see what and where you've interacted in a timeline display. Users
can follow each other of course. Twitter is also integrated- tweets
show up as floating tags on screen at the location they were tweeted
from.
The app works on both the iPhone 3G and 3GS, so anybody
with a newer generation phone can try it. Although, since the iPhone
3G doesn't have a compass built in the experience isn't all that it's
supposed to be, the app was intended to be used on a 3GS. Also, since
the application is focused on user generated content, it won't really
be all that fun until lots of people really start using it and tagging
the locations around them. Hopefully by being launched as a free
application, this will encourage iPhone users to really give it a try.
And
being that the application is free, Tonchidot needs to find an
alternative for monetizing. The company could potentially make money
by selling businesses the opportunity to insert tags (ads) into
locations in Sekai Camera. Another idea could be to create real world
augmented reality games. I've contacted the company to get some more
information on its exact business model.
In case you were wondering what Sekai Camera translates to in English: World Camera.
Steven Loeb
