This isn’t your typical Japanese high school entrance ceremony.
Japanese entertainment and internet giant Kadokawa Dwango has created a high school for the internet age, where students can study programming, game design and voice acting. So, yeah, this school is unique and other schools in Japan do not use VR headsets at their commencements.
[GIF via NicoNico]
During parts of the entrance ceremony, which was held in Tokyo, students tried on VR headsets to see the school’s Okinawa campus, where they will be studying and where a simultaneous entrance ceremony was held. The rest of the time, they had the headsets off and listened attentively to the speakers.
[GIF via NicoNico]
Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, who’s on the school’s board, was one of the speakers at the ceremony in Tokyo. He said at the start of his speech that VR made him kind of dizzy before talking about his friendship with Hayao Miyazaki and how it is important to make friends and to work with people you like.
The images of the students, all decked out in their uniforms with VR headsets on, were surreal.
[GIF via NicoNico]
But these are surreal times in which we live.
[Top image via NicoNico]
Comments
4 responses to “Japanese Students Wear VR Headsets At School Ceremony”
Japanese high schools have entrance ceremonies?
It’s a pretty famous tradition in anime series.
I actually assumed that the reason for the VR headsets was because there was a disturbing lack of cherry blossom petals falling during their ceremonies this year, so VR was being used to make sure students got an ‘authentic’ entrance ceremony experience.
These are the things that excite me about VR significantly more than games ever will. Being able to utilise all that infinite virtual space to display and represent things that you are unable to physically access or obtain. I imagine that VR will really take off in the engineering and construction industries as well because of the ability to create and interact with your concepts.
There’s already a free Ikea showroom app, which is probably the most ingenious commercial use so far.