I’m not really late to the party with this one, I just never thought of making a post about it when I first saw this (however, I did post about it two weeks ago here). But it’s exploding in popularity, even to the point where the official Hatsune Miku facebook page posted about it. It is rather neat though, so I’ll add it here for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. This will teach me a lesson to not let even seemingly small Vocaloid gadget videos slip by.

So a man in Japan has managed to create a system that projects a 3D image of Hatsune Miku onto the surrounding environment using a special pair of goggles equipped with a Kinect sensor. The system manages to work quite well at keeping track of Miku’s position, even when you’re not “facing” in her general direction. For the most part she seems to follow you around where ever you go, and doesn’t seem to do much interaction-wise. However, the creator did add in some reactions and physics for when you try to “touch” the character.

You can move her tie, pat on her head, and even try to grope her (but she wont be very pleased with this). The only downside to this system seems to be the somewhat poor image detail. This is likely attributed to either the Kinect’s low resolution camera, or the low processing power of the system that needed to be small enough to make it portable. Overall, it’s a very interesting idea that will likely lead other people trying to create their own versions of the mod.

So even though I’m horribly late with this one, enjoy the video below if you have not yet done so.