If you haven’t heard of “virtual YouTubers” or VTubers, you’re not alone: the recent Japanese trend turns human actors into cartoony virtual characters for YouTube videos. Now Japanese gaming and med…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 4 months ago | 0 comments

At JSK Lab at the University of Tokyo, roboticists have developed a robot called DRAGON, which (obviously) stands for for “Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-free…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 5 months ago | 0 comments

Japanese medical researchers just gained approval to treat patients with heart disease through a unique stem cell process. The technique is called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells -- stems cells …

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 5 months ago | 0 comments

Japan’s Preferred Networks Inc. has only one publicly available product, a whimsical application that uses artificial intelligence to automate the coloring of manga cartoons.

Yet the four-year-old fi…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 6 months ago | 0 comments

Abundant water is highly likely to exist in the form of ice under Oceanus Procellarum, a lunar mare known as “moon rabbit” in Japan, a Japanese research team has said.

Although it was long thought th…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 6 months ago | 0 comments

Preferred Networks is making changes in Japan.

Over the past few years, this AI startup has raised more than $130M in venture funding and grown to more than 130 people.

If you live outside of Japan, …

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 6 months ago | 0 comments

On March 11, 2011, Kazuya Yoshida’s lab at Tohoku University in Japan started shaking. Things fell from the ceiling. The bookshelves collapsed. Off the coast of the city of Sendai, the ocean floor ha…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 6 months ago | 0 comments

The Hikari factory is in northern Japan, in Akita Prefecture, just a little south and east of the capital city of Akita itself. Akita is on the western coast of Japan, so the prevailing winds blow fo…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 7 months ago | 0 comments

There is no legal basis for site-blocking in Japan and the country's constitution forbids censorship of any kind. Later this month, however, the government looks set to present proposals to local ISP…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 7 months ago | 0 comments

The 2018 NTT DATA Global Open Innovation Contest recently took place in Tokyo, with companies from across the globe coming together to compete for the grand prize

Participants were selected by winnin…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 6 years, 7 months ago | 0 comments