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Mixed Reality Meets Anime and Mecha

This past March at the VR Attraction Summit in Vegas, I met a young man who traveled all the way from Tokyo. Thomas Kobyashi was involved with the Japanese XR Association and invited me to Japan to see some of the latest innovations.

I’d last seen Japan in 1996. It’s a fascinating place—culturally so different from the West that the fantastic things that develop there often never make it into Western consciousness. So Kylie and I headed to Tokyo, where Thomas graciously gave us a tour of the latest installation at Tokyo Dome.

Tokyo Dome City Complex is home to the world-famous Yomiuri Giants baseball team, the most successful team in Japanese baseball history. It’s a massive indoor sports stadium with a vast retail and entertainment complex built around it. There’s a giant looping coaster, a Ferris wheel, food courts, a petting zoo, and more than I could see in a day. But the highlights were two XR attractions, developed by Tokyo Dome Corporation. 

XR Mission is the first free-roam mixed reality system I’ve seen. Even with our VIP host, we had to wait over an hour to get in; it was that popular. Their first game, Battle World 2045, is a wonderful mix of Anime styling and Mecha (think Gundam) action, making it unique in the market. But what really stands out is the social gameplay that its mixed reality technology brings out.

Using the Meta Quest headsets' video passthrough, players see each other in real life. Portals open up in the room, and you can step inside them to enter the virtual battlefield. Soon, you realize that the “real world” is a haven, and jumping back and forth between real and virtual worlds is part of the strategy. The virtual environment is a beautifully rendered Anime version of the Tokyo Dome area, so you really feel transported.

In its first year of operation, it generated over 100,000 plays in an underutilized space under an escalator. That’s seven figures of incremental revenue.

Tokyo Dome is bringing this to the IAAPA show floor for the first time. It represents the state of the art that mixed reality promises. The only other place you can try this is Tokyo, so make sure to check it out while you can. They’re also promoting their next two games for the platform, Ninja Breaker: Demon Battle, and Zombie Storm. Here’s a just dropped trailer for Ninja Breaker. There’s nothing like this in the market.

Tokyo Dome is also showcasing a large-scale, free-roam storytelling space adventure called The Moon Cruise, which I didn’t get to do because it was sold out. But it looked spectacular. It’s a free-roaming XR experience that offers an immersive "space travel" simulation. It’s high throughput, allowing dozens of guests to experience simultaneously. It combined physical props with a virtual reality experience, similar in concept to Interstellar Arc, which just opened in Las Vegas (though, given Felix and Paul’s history and experience, I am not suggesting the experiences are similar).

Drop by booth 3684 in the new exhibitor pavilion, right next to Dream Park VR (make it a twofer.)