Pasta and Vinegar points to an IHT story about a new service in Japan which allows you to point a mobile phone to a physical object and get taken to digital information about it, whether it be an historical monument or a restaurant detailing previous diners’ reviews.
We’ve been predicting this for some time now, so it’s interesting to see this in the wild, as a working solution. It uses a highly accurate version of GPS, combined with a compass and is a collaborative effort of 4 Japanese companies and an American one.
Of course, many practical problems remain. How do you populate the data in the first place, so there’s something to tell the user when they click on the object? And how do you “police” the accuracy if the data - what’s to stop a restranteur, for instance, writing their own reviews?
I suggested that this would best be achieved by a Wikipedia-style user generated content and policing collaboration, but there may be other options to launch a geographically limited solution, as a mashup between local information services, restaurant guides and maps.
The article suggests that it’ll eventually be a paid-for model (the trial is free) and that some 200,000 customers will sign up within 12 months. This seems pretty unrealistic from where I’m sitting, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see how it fares.
I agree this idea has a big future. Check out the Pondering Primate blog, which is devoted almost exclusively to evangelizing and reporting on developments of the “Physical World Hyperlink.” http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com
Hi there,
I read your article with some interest as i have been following this line of thought for a while.
You may be interested to know about http://www.wikimapia.org which allows folks to annotate the real world. Thus this is a good starting point for information. Albeit that the site is still early stage and therefore lacks the critical mass of data needed to make a decent play for the service.
Steve Devo
I don’t remember where i read tht but the concept was of vTag or virtual tag. a tagged chip would be present in almost every article from shoes to any thing and you can connect your mobile to communicate and acquire info like price comparision, discounts, article info, availibility etc and even purchase that article. that would be amazing!
Mansoor - that sounds like an RFID tag, though not sure why a retailer would encourage you to compare pricing. But the rest of the scenario seems easy enough - we just need to find a way to make them cheap enough and then to have readers in more phones.
Russell