The store is the company's first venture into mobile commerce. American Apparel says it chose to start with Japan because many Japanese consumers-especially teenagers, American Apparel's target market-are comfortable shopping from their phones.
Japanese company Seraku aims to make your network a little more ubiquitous with a prototype design for an Android-powered mirror. It uses RF proximity sensors to detect where your hands are placed so that you don't have to smudge it all up in order to check those sports scores,
Japanese researchers have unveiled the AquaTop display, which consists of a screen projected onto the surface of water, controlled by interacting with the liquid.
The creators engineered the system to use the water surface as an integral part of its control - for example, one action is carried out when users dip their fingertips to interact with a screen object, and another when they approach the item from underneath the water. On-screen items also react to the movement of the water, meaning that they can be moved or changed by simply disrupting the surface with a splash, or scooping up the water and placing it elsewhere.
"According to the Recruit Tech website, the technologies on display in the video are all ones that already exist, albeit in early forms: Apple's new, Minority Report-esque indoor tracking device, iBeacon; the XBox application SmartGlass; Kinect; and the many applications developing within the growing field of augmented reality."
London design firm Berg and the London office of the Japanese ad agency Dentsu have announced a line of augmented reality toys called Suwappu. The little figurines have swappable heads and bodies; depending on how they're configured, they interact differently and draw different environments for themselves in the augmented reality world.