IBM Japan has taken on a project of making the VRMMO world of Reki Kawahara’s Sword Art Online light novels into reality, hopefully sans the whole brain frying deaths thing. A site has been launched for applications for 208 lucky souls to alpha test SAO. Applicants will be selected by lottery to try out the experience in Tokyo on March 18 and 20.
Participants will be scanned in 3D to interact with the virtual space using IBM’s Cloud Services and SoftLayer technologies. Kirito (Yoshitsugu Matsuoka), Asuna (Haruka Tomatsu) and Yui (Kanae Ito) will be lending their voices for this project.
(Source: Crunchyroll)