The Beginning Coming to VR

The project will use the “Cognitive System” that supports human decision-making as well as “Softlayer”, IBM’s high-performance cloud system that produces the ambiance of a real world.

Reki Kawahara’s popular light novel and anime series Sword Art Online is about a group of gamers who become trapped in a virtual reality fantasy MMORPG. The plucky cast of characters are tasked with uniting to beat the MMO world within the game or die trying. There is extremely little there is known about the project at the current time with more announcements due to be made between March 18 and March 20, when there will be a Tokyo-based event on the theme. This is what IBM’s Watson did when it won a game of Jeopardy! back in 2011, though it’s unclear how it will be used in SAO: The Beginning. Not to mention that we won’t be using controllers to maneuver our way through the game – according to reports. Reiki Kawahari, creator of the Sword Art Online series, calls it “completely different from any game experience so far”. Instead, motion controls are how people will be controlling their virtual reality characters. How realistic? When they die in the game world, they die in real life. While there have been Sword Art Online video games released before, there hasn’t ever been anything like this newly-announced project from IBM Japan.