Each year during Tokyo Design Week, DesignTide Tokyo features top design innovations from a variety of fields. With today marking the end of the five-day event, we’ve highlighted three projects below that we find particularly inspirational.

Metaio, a software development company focused on augmented reality, is developing a mobile application that allows users to drop or tag locations with personal messages, websites or even complex 3D models.  With an interface similar to the augmented reality tweet viewer, the forthcoming application makes it possible to leave their virtual messages to be picked up by specific people or even create augmented graffiti on public space.
The possibilities of general commenting could integrate with Yelp to help see recent comments on nearby restaurants or alert friends of your whereabouts in an augmented reality view…with a dragon.  It is not known when [...]

Using 35 million geotagged photographs from Flickr, David Crandall and a team from Cornell University have created accurate global and city maps from the data alone. Plotting the raw data from the photos (geotags, text descriptions, key visual features) onto a blank canvas revealed the planet’s familiar landscape, as well as  where in the world people were placing their attention. They also discovered some interesting facts from the experiment, such as: New York is the world’s most photographed city (12 million images), and the midtown Apple Store is the fifth most photographed location in the city.
[New Scientist via The Morning [...]

Technology is generally meant to make life easier, but often users are bogged down in complicated process with programing, uploading and sharing their many different gadgets.  Eye-Fi, the maker of location-aware memory cards that can wirelessly upload data, has continued to expand their capabilities.  Just this week, they added a new card that can wirelessly upload video and another that can automatically geotag your video.
The system automatically uploads your data onto sites you deem appropriate, such as Flickr, YouTube or Facebook. The newest geotagging-enabled card automatically labels your photos by location and lets you upload from more than 10,000 WiFi [...]

As GPS enabled devices continue to evolve, we expect the trend of online applications that engage us in unique ways with our actual physical environments to continue developing increasingly novel uses for our lives.  One of the obvious ways is through play.  We’ve previously written about Parallel Kingdom, a location based game where users’ real world wanderings correspond to in-game movements. More recently we came upon Turf Bombing, a game that forms players into loosely associated “gangs” through shared zip codes, and whoseultimate goal is to control the most territory. Participants complete these tasks by exploring different neighborhoods, cities and even countries [...]