Sunday, January 03, 2010
TOKYO: In the Japan of 2020 a stressed-out salary man may unwind from his hectic futuristic lifestyle by time-travelling back a few centuries and taking a virtual stroll through medieval Tokyo.
As he walks over arched wooden bridges, he will chat with the avatars of his real world friends, admire pollution-free views of Mount Fuji and perhaps do some cash-free souvenir shopping for a digital download of a woodblock print.
He will navigate through the city once called Edo from the comfort of his intelligent living room, wearing 3-D glasses and moving about by waving a super-networked mobile phone that is attached to his wrist like a watch.
“This is Nihonbashi in virtual Edo,” an invisible tour guide will say in an upbeat if slightly tinny voice. “It’s a virtual community that is popular worldwide. A lot of people have logged on today already!” Welcome to the future as imagined by NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s mobile telephone giant with 55 million subscribers, which has long been a leading force for innovation in the high-tech paradise that is Japan. Its Shangri-La is the ‘Future Station’, located in a skyscraper 29 floors above Tokyo, where visitors are taken on guided tours of the company’s mobile phone marvels, and treated to a glimpse of what’s to come.
Such as the wearable phone of 2020 that DoCoMo envisions will be the user’s constant companion, fitted with a small flip-out screen and capable of projecting images onto a wall or into thin air in the form of a hologram.
It will be an ID to enter the family home or to board a flight, a device to video-chat with friends and the office, and a remote control to activate the robo-vacuum cleaner or tell the fridge to order new groceries. Made from recyclable materials and partially charged kinetically through body movements, the device will be equipped with simultaneous translation software to connect the user to everyone else, anywhere, anytime.
The vision is bold, but in Japan that doesn’t make it unrealistic. In many ways the mobile phone future has already arrived in Japan, where the evolution of the devices has taken a separate path to the rest of the world. On Tokyo’s crowded subway trains, newspapers are a rare sight as most commuters plug themselves into their cellphones or other handheld electronic devices, web-surfing, mailing, playing games or watching television
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