If your language has much more letters, say 3,000 characters, than multiple times (shift/crtl/alt) of number of keys on keyboard, you need an input method environment(IME) to tell computers what letter you want to type.

There are many IMEs exist for Traditional/Simplified Chinese and Japanese. These days operating systems have those IME bundled, on Windows, MacOS and Linux. But as it affects your writing speed, some users use non-default IMEs from other vendors. In Japanese case, long-time ex-word-processor champion Just System still sells royal fans for its IME ATOK. Two world biggest search engine companies, Google and Baidu, also offers free IME applications which utilize their massive language data collected for search engine.

On December 16th, Google Japanese Input [J], which was released by Google Japan one year ago, officially shed its beta tag after a year [J].

Google Japan’s promotion video shows you how it works on browsers/text editors/office tools. You type Japanese by pronounce, then choose the appropriate conversion from suggested selections.

Because that is conversion based on dictionary, there are a lot of enhanced conversion are integrated, too. For example, conversion between western calendar year and imperial calendar year, current time to several different notations, correct word suggestion, zip code to address, letters-based emoticons, etc. Many of those functionality are also on OS-default and other third-party Japanese IMEs.

However, one quite new, and somewhat weird conversion is embedded on the Google Japanese Input. 2-channellers pointed out that you can get fortune telling on it.

When you try to find “fortune telling” Chinese and/or Japanese word on it, its suggestions list has “(Your) today’s luck” at bottom.

For me, it is strange that the Google offers such illogical “information”. I also tried to convert zodiac names and Japanese favorite blood types but it did not give me any prophecy, yet.

See Also:

Google Japan Makes Comic Of Japanese Input Method Development

New Japanese IME Has Come From The Origin Of Chinese Characters – Baidu Japan also has Japanese Input Application

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Goodbye, Galakei feature phones: according to Tokyo-based market research firm BCN (published in The Nikkei today), smartphones accounted for 49.8% of the total number of handsets sold between December 13 and 19 in Japan.

Sure, this is just a snapshot, but there is a clear tendency to be observed here, and the smartphone segment in Japan grows much faster than many people expected. By way of comparison: in January the ratio of smartphones to total handset sales stood at around 10%.

In November, 35.5% of all handsets sold in Japan were smartphones, with almost all domestic makers saying they will boost their smartphone production (and globalization efforts) in the near future that month. The most prominent examples are Sharp and Panasonic, with big P expecting smartphones to account for 75% of total sales by 2015.

In a separately published outlook, Nomura Research Institute today said that in 2015, handset sales in Japan will grow 43% to 45.7 million between 2010 and 2015. Nomura sees smartphones accounting for 70% of the total in five years.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, Trend by Serkan Toto
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Although Xbox360 is not so popular here in Japan, some Japanese seem to love and hack Kinect. After the first interesting one to connect Kinect with virtual 3D figure dance authoring free tool Miku Miku Dance, which was originally developed by fans of Vocaloid, human voice singing synthesizer software represented by pretty popular virtual diva Hatsune Miku, to promote Vocaloid singers over the web.

On this movie, Hatsune Miku moves after the guy, Higuchuu, who input his move via Kinect device.

Then, another guy, Nao_u, went further by adding a head-mount-display to his system [J].

Firstly he (whose move shown at the top-left) set up real-time motion capture with Kinect.

Then, VR920, a head-mount-display(HMD) by Vuzix is bound its location on his face.

By geomagnetic sensor, you can get which direction the HMD faces, so it is doable to render appropriate direction in the virtual world by following the user’s head.

Nao_u is seeing his left leg, but for his viewpoint, it is Hatsune Miku is looking down her left leg in the virtual world.

Punching a virtual ball. His virtual world is using Bullet Physics Engine and collision is supported so you may hit the ball.

He wrote that he has only 1 square meter free space in front of his PC desk so he could move not so actively. He said that it will be more enjoyable with bigger space. He finished his post, “Great age comes that you can make things like this only by marketed products at your home.”

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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