This isn’t your typical Japanese high school entrance ceremony.
Japanese entertainment and internet giant Kadokawa Dwango has created a high school for the internet age, where students can study programming, game design, voice acting, and more. So, yeah, this school is unique and other schools in Japan do not use VR headsets at their commencements.
During parts of the entrance ceremony, which was held in Tokyo, students tried on VR headsets to see the school’s Okinawa campus, where they’ll be studying and where a simultaneous entrance ceremony was held. The rest of the time, they had the headsets off and listened attentively to the speakers.
Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, who’s on the school’s board, was one of the speakers at the ceremony in Tokyo. He said at the start of his speech that VR made him kind of dizzy before talking about his friendship with Hayao Miyazaki and how it is important to make friends and to work with people you like.
The images of the students, all decked out in their uniforms with VR headsets on, were surreal.
But these are surreal times in which we live.
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