Everyone has been poking fun at the whole ‘metaverse’ idea for a while now.
As Phil Iwaniuk pointed out last February, anyone who’s played video games knows the metaverse’s promised digital wonderland has been around since the days of CRT monitors.
Think Second Life, Everquest, World of Warcraft. Even VRChat got there first in 2014 if you need a headset for comparison. Now there’s a genuine challenger to that assumption. According to Automaton (translated from a PR Times press release), there’s a metaverse project that oddly feels optimistic.
It’s from Aominext, a company developing anime-styled metaverse spaces that ditch the unsettling avatars we’re used to from Zuckerberg and his crew—revealing cute anime avatars underneath, like a VTuber shedding its uncanny chrysalis.
What’s more, this doesn’t feel much like a PR stunt—especially since the company is collaborating with an actual Japanese high school (Yushi International) that already exists in the real world. Automaton reports:
“The virtual high school will have a three-year, credit-based course with a curriculum recognized by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.” Plus, the press release promises virtual events like cultural festivals and e-sports tournaments for participating students.
Want to be skeptical, but this actually feels like the first metaverse project that makes absolute sense. While it might be tempting to mock VTuber-looking kids gathered around a school table, correspondence learning has been around for years. It became more common during the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s always been somewhat socially isolating.
As the press release points out, correspondence schools often use programs like Slack or Zoom calls, which don’t replicate the feeling of being in an actual classroom. For adults, it’s not so bad, but for a young mind eager to make friends and socialize, it’s not ideal.
Sure, VR isn’t a perfect replacement for that, but it’s definitely a step up. Combining the concept of a correspondence school with a VRChat-style space where you can customize an anime avatar—something kids might actually enjoy? Feels like a natural fit. Conceptually, this whole thing is fantastic, especially since the press release promises to provide equipment to students free of charge.
Whether it’ll work in practice is another story, but cheering for this unique experiment, especially if it helps remote students feel a little less isolated. The fact that you can earn an officially-recognized diploma while rocking an anime avatar is the kind of futuristic idea all for.