Category: Japan

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JDI Developing 800 Pixels Per Inch Display That Is Ideal For VR

JDI Developing 800 Pixels Per Inch Display Ideal For VR

JDI is a Japanese electronics conglomerate that combines the display enterprises of Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi. In a recent press release, the firm announced that it is actively developing new, highly advanced displays for virtual reality, head mounted displays.

Acccording to JDI, the new displays will be, “3.42-inch low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) TFT LCD specifically designed for virtual reality (VR) head mount displays.”

The goal of these products is to “enhance reality and sense of immersion within Virtual Reality.”

The new JDI screens are built from top to bottom with VR in mind and include all of “the required display performance and characteristics for VR applications, including ultra-high resolution, high-speed response time, high refresh rate, and blinking backlight.”

JDI is aiming to tackle three major screen attributes in order to create high fidelity VR experiences. The first addresses the “screen door” effect plaguing current-gen VR headsets. As the name implies, the screen door effect is what allows a VR user to see the pixel grid of the screen inside his or her HMD. JDI currently makes a 651 ppi (pixels per inch) screen that is susceptible to screen door, but the company now wants to address this immersion-breaking phenomenon with a plan “to develop and start sample shipments of an even higher resolution 800 ppi display.”

The next pain point JDI hopes to address for VR users is motion blur. JDI’s new screens will aim to reduce motion blur by coming equipped with “a high refresh rate of 90Hz, a high-speed IPS LCD with response time 3 msec (black-to-white), and blinking backlight technology (with a 10% duty rate, typical).”

The final hurdle JDI hopes to overcome through this new project is system latency. VR system latency is the time in-between “the moment the motion sensor recognizes the start of the user’s movement and the moment the image is displayed on the VR-HMD.”

If this latency is overly significant it can lead to immediate motion sickness inside of a VR experience. JDI’s experimental screens are hoping to combat latency via “a high refresh rate and a high-speed IPS LCD, which contributes to shorten the latency of the display.”

JDI currently, “provides high resolution, low power consumption and thin displays for smartphones, tablets, automotive electronics, digital cameras, medical equipment and other electronic devices.” It began operations in 2012.

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Images courtesy of JDI

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For Japan’s ‘stranded singles’, virtual love beats the real thing

Multimillion-pound industry caters for young people enamoured of fictional computer characters

Japan’s apparently waning interest in true love is creating not just a marriage crisis but a relationship crisis, leading young people to forgo finding a partner and resort to falling for fictional characters in online and video games.

New figures show that more than 70% of unmarried Japanese men and 75% of women have never had any sexual experience by the time they reach 20, though that drops to almost 50% for each gender by the time they reach 25.

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‘Summer Lesson’ on PS VR Will Get Official English Subtitle Support

‘Summer Lesson’ on PS VR Will Get Official English Subtitle Support

Summer Lesson from Bandai Namco was one of the very first PlayStation VR titles to gain much public notoriety. In the game, you take on the role of a tutor for a teenager named Hikari Miyamoto. Details have, for the most part, been relatively scarce on the title, but a new trailer released today (shown below) officially confirms full English subtitle support when it releases in Southeast Asia early next year, according to Gematsu.

The game features a unique twist on the popular ‘dating sim‘ genre of games. Rather than simply tasking you with developing a relationship with the female character, you’re in charge of her education as well. But as you can tell from the footage and screenshots, the undertones are not purely platonic.

We’ve known these general themes all along though, as the game is clearly designed and marketed as something to fulfill a very specific niche that enjoys much more popularity in the Japanese gaming industry. But in the trailer, embedded above, we’re now getting an official glimpse at the English version of the game’s elements. Hikari is shown telling you things such as:

“We went to the pool recently, want to take a look at the photo?”

“It feels awkward to have someone besides my family in my room.”

“Isn’t this the moment where couples would hold hands?”

The majority of the game appears to take place inside Hikari’s bedroom, helping her study. On Twitter, the Game Director for the project, Katsuhiro Harada stated that Summer Lesson will be a download-only title with no retail packaging. That means players interested in getting the game somewhere other than Southeast Asia will need to create a new region-specific PSN account, since the stores are separate. It’s a common work around that people use on PlayStation 4 for purchasing and playing titles from other regions.

It probably goes without saying that Summer Lesson isn’t going to appeal to the wider Western audience, so a full release is unlikely. The sexual undertones and intimate content are likely to be off-putting in general and, in all likelihood, will be rather uncomfortable for people to experience this level of intimacy and interaction with a digital character.

But to be clear, Summer Lesson is not a VR sex game, hentai game, or even a ‘Girlfriend Simulator’ from what we have seen so far. To avoid confusion, VR Kanojo is a decidedly different game entirely, albeit quite similar visually, and could be easily confused.

That being said, a number of Japanese developers are well-known for their use of sexuality in games, such as Dead or Alive’s VR mode and many VR events. Western and Japanese audiences, and cultures, are quite different.

Summer Lesson is anticipated to release in early 2017 for PS VR.