Last week I went to the SFC Open Research Forum 2004, held on the 40th floor of Roppongi Hills; an event that serves as a window to most projects under developement at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University in Tokyo. On the event’s website, the lists of sessions, poster sessions and exhibitions are impressive (unfortunately, most linked materials are in Japanese).

On site, Eliica the famous electric car developped by the university was on display. At my arrival, I was given an RFID-embedded badge to track me in the expo space as well as allow me to mark projects I liked by waving the badge in front of readers installed at each booth.

Of all the geeky projects there, one that seemed to gather most interest was a stereo-photography installation called 3D Muscle using a gun-shaped-double-camera-phone object which when pointed to a scale model of the SFC campus would display the corresponding “real space” stereo-pictures of the campus, taken from the same angle, onto the phones’ screens and viewable through a special lens attached to the gun.
Despite the attraction, the project seemed to lack in realistic immediat applications as it would require photographing the chosen space from all possible positions and angles (and indeed the shots of the campus had been taken in advance), but as the project matures I’m sure that exciting applications will be worked out (tied in with 3D models of cities?).

One funny innovation: the pictures taken of the scale model were also decoded and added in real time to a stereo-moblog (must be a first) that was also viewable in 3D with special lens glasses (can’t seem to find a link to that one…).