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Fig. 5.15
Miku stay in park
(Image Courtesy “alsione svx”
2013
)
5.3.4
Between the Environmental and Embodied: The Return
of Hatsune Miku
In this section, the AR applications depicted have ranged from interior architecture
to the geologic, but a peculiar subset of environmental applications have emerged
in Japan, based yet again on our virtual pop idol, Hatsune Miku. I place them
between the environmental and the embodied/wearable modalities as they entail
both a Kinect-like spatial camera linked to the headset, making them embodied, but
specifically about orienting the subject in the environment. The subject in question
is Miku herself, and the applications are
Miku Stay,
a series of experiments to have
Hatsune Miku as a happy, live-in girlfriend, and another to take the interaction one
step further and situate Miku as a sleeping partner.
In
Miku Stay
(svx
2013
)
,
created by a YouTube member named “alsione svx”,
Miku exhibits complex interactions like walking up to the viewer in a park as
in Fig.
5.15
, walking around a kitchen, and sitting in a chair (and impressively
dealing with occlusion by walking
behind it
) and holding hands. Most of these are
accomplished through spatial camera and fiducial markers, but eventually alsione
svx mentions that he can't stand using these any more in the video, so he uses
environmental cues such as the chair as a marker. She comes over, stands on the
bathroom scale, holds hands and then jumps around laughing merrily.
Miku Stay
is a feminist's nightmare, as the app allows the user to live with a hopelessly
idealized “waifu” creating expectations unattainable by flesh and blood. If this were
not problematic enough, the
Sleep Together
app (
Miku Miku Soine,
Fig.
5.16
)by
Nico Douga (Tackett
2013
) takes this one step further, as Miku becomes the user's
