Araki is an interestingly influential person. I’ve never followed the lives of most manga authors, sothis may be normal and I just don’t know, but it’s impressive that the guy who wrote and drew a scene where an octopus starts eating an airplane causing it to crash into a volcano inspires lectures at universities and new generations of technology.
Araki recently attended a lecture at Tohoku University in his hometown of Sendai where the AR (“augmented reality”) Brothers, a team of virtual reality researchers, were debuting their new technology inspired by the idea of creating stands for real. The initial demonstration was firing a beam at an object on a screen causing the corresponding real object to fall over and culminated in Araki himself getting to try a head mounted module. He wore the helmet that played a recording of a lady who was not really there but was able to hold a real time conversation with him in such a way that he couldn’t tell beyond the head gear. Naotaka Fujii, creator of the SR (“substitute reality”) system that Araki wore, said that his tech is on the Stand level.
I wonder how the experience will affect Araki’s work. He said that, “I think we can create new concepts and stories using these technologies.” If it wasn’t for the timing, I’d say this is where Tsurugi’s stand came from because the same face nightmare Yasuho’s going through sounds like something that would come from this. Maybe it will in the long run. Then he and Hideo Kojima can team up, and the universe will explode in confusion.
(Original article and image from Asahi Shimbun. Thanks to ANN for their article on it.)
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