Kotaku East East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am. Prev Next View All

Back in February, Kotaku reported that IBM was making a real-life Sword Art Online concept, minus the real-life killing. Here’s a look at people testing the VR experience out at an event this week in Tokyo.


Sword Art Online is set in the year 2022, when thousands of players who have logged into a Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (VRMMORPG) called, well, Sword Art Online discover that they cannot log out. It’s been adapted in a popular anime and you can read more about Sword Art Online here.

While this apparently isn’t going to be a standalone game per se, it does let participants see how IBM’s computing power can recreate Sword Art Online in a virtual environment. It’s also an opportunity for the company to show off its SoftLayer cloud service and its cognitive systems. Win, win, no?


Inside Games reports that out of over 100,000 applicants (geeeeez), just 208 were selected to experience this Sword Art Online demo.

Below are photos from Inside, 4Gamer, and Twitter user Nagare, who participated in the event, was impressed, writing, “IBM is amazing!”


[Image: IBM via Inside


[Image: IBM via Inside

[Image: IBM via Inside



The testing ends on March 20.




Top image: Inside