I'm Takahito Iguchi, CEO of timespace. People call me TAKA.
Let me introduce myself, briefly. I've started several companies, mostly in augmented reality, wearables, and voice-based social. My biggest personal theme has always been "solving loneliness" — and right now, at timespace, I'm building AI that thinks about people's future behavior.
Everything I've built has used a different medium each time. But underneath, it's really been the same question, asked over and over.
Sekai Camera pinned invisible information onto physical space, by hand. Telepathy tried to make you wear that information on your body. After I stepped down as CEO of both Tonchidot and Telepathy, what I felt most strongly was simply wanting to talk to people. So with Dabel, and then Audio Metaverse, we let go of the visual entirely, and tried to rebuild the distance between people through voice alone. No face, no title — just the warmth of a voice.
Back when I was studying philosophy at a small university in Kyoto, I came across Nagarjuna and Indian philosophy, and I've doubted ever since that a "self" exists at all outside of relationships. A space built on voice alone was the first place I could actually test that hypothesis with technology.
What we're doing at timespace now is closer to bringing that whole arc full circle. Point a camera at a place, and AI reads its context — its history, its traces, someone's memory of it — and turns that into a short story. Search can only answer you once you've already put what you want to know into words. But the most interesting things are usually there before they've become words at all. Back in the Sekai Camera days, we were pinning tags by hand, one at a time; now, AI can generate the place's own story on its own. It's a weave of memory and civilization, spun together by people, places, and the history layered between them.
Eighteen years ago, I started by pinning information onto a place. Now, working with AI, I've gotten as far as making the place itself readable. The one thing that hasn't changed: wanting to make visible what wasn't visible. Maybe that's all it ever was.
