Bringing the real world into a mobile RPG

Darn! Sometimes I wish I lived in Japan, so I could play some of the coolio new mobile games available there. Case in point: the recently-released Final Fantasy VII: Before Crisis, which is a prequel-of-sorts to the next installment in the wildly popular Final Fantasy series. This game runs exclusively on the Panasonic FOMA P900iv, an advanced mobile phone that's sold more than 4 million units in Japan so far. To me, the most interesting aspect of this game is how it utilizes the phone's camera.

Materia is an integral part of the game and players will need to use the F900's camera and phone features to make the most out of it. To activate the various types of material, you must take a picture of an object of a similar color. However, each phone can only have a finite amount of material; the only way to get more is to interact with other users. (It's almost as devilishly clever as needing another player to catch all the Pokemon.)