Yoichi Ochiai and Keisuke Toyoshima from Tsukuba University developed a car with facial expression - convey your driving intentions and emotions over the car, to communicate with other drivers and around.

Humans and vehicles can be unified as one unit by Homunculus.
It is based on a new concept of interactions between humans and vehicles. It
promotes and augments non-verbal communicability humans in vehicles.

Your head's move makes the car's "eyes" move,

Your hands sign will be projected on the road ahead,

Your arms feel objects approaching for the car from the side,

The research is a subsequent project of their Indicatable Road: Mixed Reality Navigation System, which projects your intention on road by special head-lights.

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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Listagram is an unofficial Instagram related site by Kotaro Chiba, which lists up Instagram photos by specific user.

Giving a single URL of the Instagram photo will show the set of photos by the user. You need to set profile if you want to be searched on it. RSS feed will be generated so you may subscribe your favorite Instagrammer.

Instastream was inspired [J] by Listagram, made by Yusukebe (Yusuke Wada) [J]. The site shows "a public timeline of Instagram" by using Instagram photo URLs appearing on the Twitter's public timeline. Precisely speaking, you will see only photos shared over Twitter, but still it is a lot.

Both services are said to use unofficial API of Instagram. Instagram is trying to shut off the unofficial API users.

via Tatsuwo no ChangeLog [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Another day, another GREE-related news item on Asiajin. Today, it's about GREE's web site for smartphones for which new games by third-party developers have been added. If you access GREE through an iPhone or Android handset, you're now able to play a total of 15 games from twelve different companies (full list in Japanese here).

Here's GREE's new smartphone games section (iPhone version):

This is the just the first batch of games integrated into GREE's web application, including titles from companies such as Sega, gumi and Tonchidot. Needless to say, you can use virtual currency to advance faster in the games.

Here are some pictures showing Tonchidot's Augmented Reality-powered LBS RPG Demon Wars:

And for GREE, beefing up the web app is just the first step in the smartphone area. As announced by the company last month, the so-called "GREE Platform for smartphone" also includes offering native applications for the iPhone and Android (both of which will be released in the next few weeks).

The company says it so far attracted about 200 companies, which will roll out games for the smartphone platform in the near future.

Pictures courtesy of Chiho Komoriya's blog

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
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photo © 2005 shibainu | more info (via: Wylio)

Roppongi Hills is a central Tokyo landmark, and is well-known as the
preferred office location for many top IT companies in Tokyo. Current
tenants include Google Japan and Gree, and the likes of Yahoo! Japan,
Livedoor, and Rakuten have all had their head offices there in the
past.

Its internal carpark space offers about 1,900 parking slots [J], and
as space is a precious commodity in densely populated central Tokyo,
it's no surprise that most of these parking spaces are inside a
section that stacks vehicles up vertically.

Here's an interesting video posted by YouTube user cat2525jp. She or
he intentionally left a working video camera on the dashboard of the
car to be parked.

The first half shows the car being loaded, and the rest is the
unloading. Parking here costs 300 yen (US$3.6) for 30 minutes.

A similar video from another user 113icecream was shot in Roppongi
Midtown, where Yahoo! Japan has its head office. Parking here will set
you back 100 yen (US$1.20) every 10 minutes.

(proofread by Adam Walls)

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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M&A-related news are relatively rare in Japan's startup scene, but today we can report that mobile social gaming juggernaut GREE has acquired Tokyo-based ad exchange service Atlantis for 2.2 billion yen ($26 million). The company will be turned into a GREE subsidiary.

Big G says that the acquisition marks their entry into the mobile/smartphone ad business, which has been growing rapidly in Japan in recent months. With the move, GREE also wants to strengthen its recently launched "GREE Platform for smartphone" by which games will be offered to users of Android handsets and iPhones.

In November last year, Atlantis registered 500 million impressions through smartphones across its ad network and says it sees this number increasing by 10-20% monthly. At 45 billion, the number of impressions served on all mobile phones in Japan (during August 2010) is significantly higher.

Atlantis was founded in 2007 and currently employs 15 people.

Via TechCrunch Japan

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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