At the end of October, KDDI released the DION Lab (DION ラボ) to highlight what they see as the future of the Internet, and of more intuitive browsing. Without a doubt, the concept has depth and is very smooth and visually appealing, which is what we expect to see as normal for Web 3.0 (or whatever people decide to call it). Clicking on a 3-D room dives you straight inside to explore, though exploration is not done in 3-D.
DION is divided into four rooms, each with subcategories:
TOP LEFT: The “Utilities” room includes a movie recommendation tool based on your feelings. I don’t put a lot of faith into projects like this, since they almost always give people like me bad recommendations. There’s also a five-minute TOEIC Test (English competency test) level check, as well as an English study guide/test that can create its own original problems for you to solve.
BOTTOM LEFT: “Communication” is, obviously, for communicating with others. Right now it’s pretty basic, with a search tool to navigate through personal blogs and find others that are similar to you. It runs on a kind of tagging system that creates a web between users and highlights similar people with a red “thread”, via red text. “Communication” also has an odd feature that let’s you send someone a “secret” picture that they discover by superimposing two other pictures.
TOP RIGHT: A robot moves boxes around, but always to the same place. Perhaps he needs something better to do?
BOTTOM RIGHT: “Interface” helps to make a digest of a normal webpage and make it easy to view on a mobile phone. Well, at least for KDDI’s AU phones, but the concept is cool since it has to sort through lots of webpage information and bring out the good stuff.
To sum it up, DION has a really smooth interface, but not a lot of depth right now. You also have to be a DION subscriber to actually test any of this stuff out, and we are not. Perhaps, beyond that login wall, is a deep cavern of internet future, but what we see on the surface so far is enough to keep us interested.
More on KDDI and their Designing Studio HERE.
Pictures via DION Lab
Michael is the Editor of JapanTrends.com and Director of the 
