I mentioned a little while ago that you could now view a number of 3d panoramas of Tokyo. Google have somewhat outdone this today with their new addition to Google Maps, ‘Street View’.

Although you cannot view panoramas of Tokyo (hopefully you will be able to soon) you can view panoramas of just about every street in a number of large US cities such as San Francisco, and New York. You can also move forward, backwards, left and right!

To use the new feature you must first be in a city which displays the ‘Street View’ menu option. Once ‘Street View’ is selected you will be presented with an icon which you can drag to your desired viewing point, proceed to click this icon and the panorama will appear.

Source: Slashdot

The previous Japanese Idol post we made was pretty popular, with lots of people demanding MOAR, and as such I have decided to expediently make another.

This time the idol being featured is one Mihiro Taniguchi. Enjoy the images:

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Japanese Foreign Minister, and part-time otaku, Taro Aso has recently announced plans for an “International Manga Award”. During the announcement Aso said that he would like to “make this award the ‘Nobel Prize’ of Manga”.

In the context of the award ‘International’ excludes Japan; the idea behind the award is to reward foreign artists who best contribute to the spread of manga abroad.

The nomations, which may be submitted by the public and international publishing companies, will be judged by a number of famous mangaka, such as Takashi Yanase and Tetsuya Chiba, as well as the chief editors of a number of large manga magazines.

An award ceremony will be held on July 2nd where the winner and three runners up will receive a certificate and trophy each. They will also get to spend 10 days in Japan to meet with Japan’s own mangaka community.

Source: ANN, CNN

If you are an Otaku then Tokyo is certainly a must visit destination. Unfortunately for most of us this probably won’t be happening for quite a while to come.

Instead of being confined to constantly looking over 2D images and video, thanks to the Tokyo VR Project you can now view and interact with 3D panoramas of a number of destinations throughout the city.

The panoramas make use of Apple’s Quicktime VR technology, and I highly recommend you check them out.

Here are a few 2D snapshots of one of the panoramas:

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Under the current copyright laws in Japan copyright violators go unpunished unless the issue is pursued by the owner of the infringed material. This is essential for the doujinshi (fan manga) community as 95% of all doujinshi work breaks copyright laws.

Generally copyright owners of popular anime/manga shows depicted in doujinshi turn a blind eye to the infringement as doujinshi spurs interest in the series and is generally good for business; unfortunately this could all change with new copyright legislation being proposed.

Under the new legislation the Japanese police would be given authority to arrest copyright infringers based purely on their own judgment, and not necessarily at the request of the actual copyright owners. Bad news for doujinshi producers/consumers.

Source: CannedDogs

Forget about the people who tell you that you should use Photoshop for your designs, the real pros use Microsoft Excel :P. Check out this video of Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu’s Yuki Nagato being created entirely in Excel:

Via: AnimeOnline

One thing that has been distinctly lacking from the site, a topic I mentioned in our very first post, is idol related articles. I shall try and atone for my sins by posting idol related material regularly from now on.

Sayuri Ohtomo seemed like a great choice to get things started, so here she is:

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If you live in UK you will know that the current state of anime on TV is pretty pitiful. There have been a few good times, such as when the station CNX was on air and the late night anime shown on Sci-Fi, however they have usually been quite short lived.

Things are finally about to pick up again; Anime Network (owned by ADV) have announced that they will be licensing two hours of anime programming a week to UK station Propeller TV. Check out the official website here.

Included in the line-up are some great shows such as Evangelion and Elfen Lied, and I’m sure there will be lots more if it successful. The anime block will be airing 8:00pm-10:00pm, beginning June 3rd; hopefully the late showing time implies everything will be uncut!

There is also news that Sony’s Animax anime channel could soon be hitting the UK.

Via: ANN

Foreign otaku staying in Tokyo have reason to be happy; Nakano Broadway, a five story tall shopping center which is famous for its otaku related merchandise (anime, manga, figures, etc), is targeting Tokyo’s non-Japanese community as part of a new publicity campaign.

One element of the campaign will be the creation of a guide map in a variety of languages including English, Chinese, and Korean. There was also a raffle held over the weekend (May 5th-May 6th) for foreign passport/id holders only, prizes included digital cameras and mp3 players.

Q-taro has a nice visual tour of Nakano Broadway which you can check out here.

Source: ANN

The days of the real life Seiyuu (voice actors), at least for amateur anime productions, may be limited; Japanese software companies Animo and Celsys (who specialize in speech synthesis and anime/manga tools respectively) have teamed up to create a speech synthesis package which is specifically aimed at the anime, game, and entertainment industries.

The piece of software, known as Free Speech, will allow producers to easily generate narration and lines of dialogue according to their specification.

Animo and Celsys say that the software should allow independent and amateur creators to considerably reduce their costs.

Via: ANN