Mobile Suit Gundam announces a collaboration with Atlas V to release an “interactive movie” for Meta Quest.
Gundam has a history of unusual projects.
VR anime projects have been getting more popular in recent years.
Mobile Suit Gundam (Kidou Senshi Gundam) is, undoubtedly, one of the biggest and most iconic anime franchises ever. Being the poster child for the mecha genre, it spawned countless separate installments, taking place in different universes/”timelines”, and can be somewhat intimidating to get into. The recently released The Witch from Mercury (Suisei no Majo) spinoff has been a hit both domestically and globally. And now, the franchise announces yet another entry, Silver Phantom (Ginkai no Genei) — except this one is made for VR.
What is this exactly?
With only a short teaser, which features no actual footage, released, it is hard to speculate what Silver Phantom is going to be about exactly. The information released as of now is limited to production details: this project will be an interactive VR movie, made as a collaboration between Bandai Namco Pictures (formerly Studio Sunrise) and Atlas V, a company specialized in virtual reality. It will be released for Meta Quest, a virtual reality system developed by Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). Nothing else is known at the moment, including the number of episodes, how long it will be, or which timeline it belongs to.
Gundam often experiments with different platforms
With dozens of entries throughout more than four decades, this is not the first time Gundam releases an entry which is not viewable on a normal screen. One may remember Gundam Neo Experience 0087: Green Divers, a short released exclusively in planetariums and dome theaters in 2001, which later would be screened at IMAX theaters and venues, but will remain unavailable to the general public until April 2023, when it was released… in a smartphone app. There are also dozens, if not hundreds, of short movies which you can only see screened through a giant projector on a wall outside of Gundam Front Tokyo.
More VR anime in the future?
This is not the first time an anime project is made for VR. Spice and Wolf (Ookami to Koushinryou) attempted this a few years earlier, and since then, there has been a slow but steady rise in the number of interactive VR anime projects. With them belonging somewhere between the mediums of anime and game, it can be argued that they are more of the latter than the former. However, it seems that we’ll be seeing more of these as the virtual reality technology develops further. It’s probably a good thing: anime should experiment more with different formats, breaking conventional rules for the sake of creativity.
Creativity of Gundam has no limits!
Summary:
Mobile Suit Gundam announces a collaboration with Atlas V to release an “interactive movie” for Meta Quest.
Gundam has a history of unusual projects.
VR anime projects have been getting more popular in recent years.
Mobile Suit Gundam (Kidou Senshi Gundam) is, undoubtedly, one of the biggest and most iconic anime franchises ever. Being the poster child for the mecha genre, it spawned countless separate installments, taking place in different universes/”timelines”, and can be somewhat intimidating to get into. The recently released The Witch from Mercury (Suisei no Majo) spinoff has been a hit both domestically and globally. And now, the franchise announces yet another entry, Silver Phantom (Ginkai no Genei) — except this one is made for VR.
What is this exactly?
With only a short teaser, which features no actual footage, released, it is hard to speculate what Silver Phantom is going to be about exactly. The information released as of now is limited to production details: this project will be an interactive VR movie, made as a collaboration between Bandai Namco Pictures (formerly Studio Sunrise) and Atlas V, a company specialized in virtual reality. It will be released for Meta Quest, a virtual reality system developed by Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). Nothing else is known at the moment, including the number of episodes, how long it will be, or which timeline it belongs to.
Gundam often experiments with different platforms
With dozens of entries throughout more than four decades, this is not the first time Gundam releases an entry which is not viewable on a normal screen. One may remember Gundam Neo Experience 0087: Green Divers, a short released exclusively in planetariums and dome theaters in 2001, which later would be screened at IMAX theaters and venues, but will remain unavailable to the general public until April 2023, when it was released… in a smartphone app. There are also dozens, if not hundreds, of short movies which you can only see screened through a giant projector on a wall outside of Gundam Front Tokyo.
More VR anime in the future?
This is not the first time an anime project is made for VR. Spice and Wolf (Ookami to Koushinryou) attempted this a few years earlier, and since then, there has been a slow but steady rise in the number of interactive VR anime projects. With them belonging somewhere between the mediums of anime and game, it can be argued that they are more of the latter than the former. However, it seems that we’ll be seeing more of these as the virtual reality technology develops further. It’s probably a good thing: anime should experiment more with different formats, breaking conventional rules for the sake of creativity.
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