Richard Fukuoka of Japanese tech bible Weekly Ascii materialized in San Francisco late last week for the Apple World Wide Developers Conference. He’s here in the USA to promote Ascii’s latest endeavor, “Tokyo Kawaii Magazine”, a English language magazine for the iPhone, available in both free and paid versions, filled to the digital brim with – as the flier puts it – “Anime, Fashion, and Tokyo Topics”. My company jaPRESS is handling localization for TKM, and we’ve also been hired to oversee translation and rewriting of a Certain Ascii Media Works Manga That Shall Remain Nameless (for now, at least).
Although I wasn’t expecting anything more than a simple meet-and-greet with Richard, he whipped out his iPhone and iPad to show me two things that blew my mind wide open. Believe me, my facial expression did a complete 360 after I saw....
1. The “augmented reality” feature from Konami’s Love Plus game, in which a simple paper printout of a symbol (in this case, a plus sign and a heart mark) creates a 3-D image of a Love Plus character in the finished photo when taken with a webcam (see above). It even automatically adds the correct copyright information to any situation, whether you want it or not. Talk about a killer app...
2. The Hatsune Miku concert from March 2010, in which the virtual Vocaloid idol finally became as “real” as virtual idol can with the aid of state-of-the-art projection and a special curved screen. Finally, the holographic promise of anime pop concerts in Macross city (or Megazone 23, your choice) has been made manifest, and the only natural reaction to this alien lifeform, judging from this audience, is to cheer or scream...or both.
Maybe you've seen both of these examples before. Fuck, maybe you're even waving around a glow stick as I type this. Either way, what I saw gave me acute future shock. That's in part because philosophically, we're at a dead end. The simulations just keep getting better and better. But that's besides the point...As much as Japan pundits are now wringing their hands over the nation falling behind in the tech and gaming sweepstakes, here are two startling examples of Japan doing things that fall into no other category other than "magic" with emerging and existing technologies.
The precedents go back to the post-war era, when Japan pioneered the art of miniaturizing transistors and became a world leader in the consumer electronics racket. Japan didn't invent the TV or the radio or the cassette player or the computer game, but they sure managed to put a big old Made in Japan stamp on them.
So, at the risk of sounding really naive, I’d like to think that the ever-increasing Apple and Android-ization of our daily lives will give the guys in the lab (especially the really old guy who smells like an ashtray) another chance to hit a home run. Not saying they will, and all bets are off, but it's hard not to feel like there's at least another brass ring up for grabs...unless it too turns out to be a hologram.
The catch is that otaku desire and obsession seems to be in the driver’s seat this time, rather than the needs of the nuclear family (see also: anime). Lots will depend on whether the corporate owned tech that gives birth to Love Plus and Vocaloid will ever be developed beyond 2D fetishism. I don't know. Maybe otaku themselves should put down the doujinsji and figure out how to 3D laser-project? After all, military radar helped to create television, and World War I was the cradle of wireless radio...
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