Going 3D

First Miku video on Youtube that uses native youtube 3D player. Put on your colored glasses or cross your eyes and enjoy the video. I don't have the glasses so I chose "Cross-eyed" from 3D menu. For those who are not familiar with this viewing technique, here are a few tips. Try to look somewhere in the air between screen and yourself. You'll see 4 instances of the video this way, probably blurred. You have to match the middle ones and it should instantly become clear. If it doesn't happen, try to choose another distance. I have found that the farther away and the smaller the video is, the better is to get the effect. Still fullscreen can be viewed too when you know the trick.

The embedded player doesn't show the 3D button so I suspect you might not see the "Cross-eyed" version by default. If that's the case, click on video and go to Youtube to see it.

Near Future


One more for your pleasure. No youtube-3D player this time.

White Letter


The brave will also look this random dot noise video with hidden Miku. I saw her there :)

And I'm finishing off with something I would like to have at home, on my TV.

A taste of classical music

Today it was my graduation ceremony. All the guys in suits and girls in beautiful dresses reminded the time when I sang in chorus. Especially vivid memories were from a trip to Finland where we performed Phantom Of The Opera on stage in multiple locations. I know it is over hyped, but I still like it very much. This lead me to a search for Vocaloid related classical songs, here is my selection of some of the best I found :)

Phantom Of The Opera performed by Miku and a human voice. Background music quality is good and the voice of Miku is touching. I think it was a fun to make piece - singing quality duet with Miku. Among with the good words I still must tell that even if it's the best Miku's performance of this song, I didn't like how the instruments fitted together towards the end. Also I'd like to hear wider dynamic range with such a song. Anyway, I love it.



Didn't like that the male voice was not synthesized? Here's a version for you with Gakupo. He is maybe even more enjoyable than the male voice in previous one. This video might play in mono, so you may want to click here for much better quality.



While Miku and other Japanese Vocaloids are struggling with English, this is not a case with Prima. She is a virtual professional female soprano singer and can sing in English. The next song Eden, originally sang by Sarah Brightman, gets a very cute and lovable twist when sang by Prima.



Here's one cracy one. An instrumental song by Liszt (one of my favorite classics) played through midi with Miku's voice. It is even hard to tell if it is Miku or not, but I think it is. Grand Galop Chromatique.



Let the last be not so classic, but close enough to fit under this theme. Enya - Orinoco Flow sang by Prima. I wanted to put it here, because this is a lovely song and Prima does a great job here too.



This is all for now. New news and songs next time, hopefully soon :)

Small update and congratulations

First of all, we have not been kidnapped by aliens and intend to keep on bringing you, dear readers more Miku delights. As far as I know, Toomas was busy getting his Master's degree and I was busy getting my Bachelor's degree, so neither of us had any time to keep up with the news or write anything interesting.

Yesterday Toomas had his birthday and I remembered it all too late. To make up for it, here is Miku with some chocolate. Congratulations.

「NIGHT FLIGHT」

Oh what lovely pure synth I'm hearing. Boarding to Lovely Night Flight with Miku starts in 5 minutes. Make sure you have all your belongings with you and don't forget the good mood :)



Originally a Pino commercial but it's more than that performed by Perfume.

Miku likes Perfume "Disco" songs?

Room Disco


... and Chocolate Disco too.

A Peek of Project Diva 2

As you might already know, Project Diva 2 will be released on the PSP on 29. July 2010 and is already up for pre-order. Little was known about it until now, some speculations being that it will be the same game with a new pack of songs. As it turns out, there have been changes in gameplay - in the first game, you usually needed two buttons, sometimes three and when the game wanted to make you howl, 4 buttons. Now it seems that instead of 20-hit rows with one button, there will be 4 buttons most of the time with surprise arrow targets to keep your left thumb busy, while in the original it was only idly gripping the PSP.



I seriously hope that they have balanced the tracks better than in the original. Some tracks with ridiculous bpm were easily completed because of the near-perfect rhythm, whereas some slow tracks seemed to have random targets in some places.

Let's just hope for the best.

AlliumProject

What would fit a Voice Synthesizer more than electronic music? Out of the vast depths of internet comes a completely unknown doujin album simply labeled "AlliumProject – Stir up Club Edition V2" The genres would be progressive electro and trance, befitting for a vocaloid, yet not that common. I was instantly hooked on it and have been listening to it ever since. Somewhat straying from the mainstream, it does not focus on the Vocaloid part, but more on the instrumental. As a listener of this type of music, I would go as far to say that this is "good electro with some vocaloid"



As it is doujin, it is legally obtainable for free from here. Can't link it directly though. It does not require registration nor does it have annoying ads.

In case the previous track was a bit too much for your taste, this is a bit more mellow, being somewhere in the dance region.


One more interesting experiment on the album was that there had been effort put into making Luka sing in english. I must say I am not a fan of her voice, it sounds atrocious in english and the track itself is not that good either. Now I only need an explanation to why I have been listening to it for 3 days.



All the info is tersely noted here and it is all in japanese. The 500 yen price tag is enough to make every vocaloid fan want to move to japan.

Black★Rock Shooter photo shooting

Kodomut has posted in his photoblog quite an impressive photo shooting sessions from Black Rock Shooter figure. One is a daytime version and another is a night version. Here is a slideshow that I could embed from Kodomut's Flickr account.



I can say that I am quite a fan of his photos and keep an eye on his photoblog. In many of his shooting sessions there is a role for nendoroid Miku. In fact he has multiple Mikus and a great collection of other nendoroids and other figures too. It won't be boring.


Last pic was from here and as all pics in this post, it is shot by kodomut.

In case you were expecing real BRS shoots, then don't be dissapointed. Take a look at this outstanding *sakana's BRS cosplay session. As a vocaloid fan and great cosplayer, we've mentioned her before in Magnet cosplay post.

Introducing Genjitsutouhi-P aka wowaka

It doesn't happen very often when I find such a great vocaloid song that I must find out who made it. Today I searched for the author of two such songs and they turned out to be the same. He is known as Genjitsutouhi-P or wowaka (see his blog, in Japanese). He's been around and making songs starting from May 2009. Now looking at his playlist in nicovideo I see that I have heard some, but never dug deeper.

Here these songs are accompanied with appealing video and English subs. His songs tend to go along with black and white. Somehow it suits his technically not too complex style well.

Rolling Girl


Two-Faced Lovers


The last song definately has a strong message...

Aiko singing with Miku's voice

Today I was checking out the progress of Project Aiko. It is a pretty impressive fembot taking account that it is mostly built by one man. He has always been fascinated by robotics and anime. The major push came from watching Chobits.

Anyway in one old video posted to Project Aiko homepage I discovered that he has made Aiko sing and to my big surprise the voice was all familiar Hatsune Miku singing the opening theme of Record of Lodoss War Anime. I guess it was a live performance. In the future Aiko might use Vocaloids for primary speech synthesis, but the status of this development is not known.



Citing Le Trung "Aiko singing opening theme song from Record of Lodoss War Anime. I have tried integrating Vocaloid with the BRAINS software for the first time. It doesn't go as well as I have hoped (too much echo), but it's a start."

PS. And a warm welcome to our new follower :)

EDIT:
I got a reply from Le Trung. It seems it won't happen soon, but no need to bury the hope yet! Citing:
"I am still working on it slowly. Due to back to school.
Don't really have much time to work on Aiko."

Miku Live Performance - Miku's Day

You might remember Miku's first Live Performance and the blog entry about it. While that was simply showing videos of Miku on a big screen, thanks to the wonders of Science, something thought to be impossible has been made possible - a full 3D "hologram" of our beloved Vocaloid on the stage. The technological miracle making this all possible is called "Transparent screen Projector". I really don't know about the details, but you can see the amount of realism it gives when compared to an average screen.

The models used are 99% perfect, you can still notice some artificial elements, but overall, it is very smooth and lifelike, the little details like changing the outfit during smoke bursts are just the little bit extra that make it even better.


The only thing that I couldn't get used to would be her size. But it is also understandable and reasonable - if they can make her visible from all across the concert hall, why not do so?

For more pictures, info and all the videos, go to Sankakucomplex.

EDIT:
First of all, I would like to apologize for the confusion on why both blogkeepers wrote on the same subject - after same careful analysis from a hired chimp squad, it turns out that we started writing the posts at the somewhat same time, so neither of us knew that the other one was already writing. I actually discovered the 2nd post 3 days later.
Second: As Toomas already said, Sega has forced youtube to remove all videos of the show, thus everything we embedded earlier might or more probably, will not work. If I manage to find reuploaded versions or videos on niconico, I will edit this post again.

Miku's Day live consert!

On 9th of March at Zepp Tokyo concert hall something special and heartwarming for all Miku fans happened. The most spectacular Vocaloid concert this far was held there called "39's Giving Day" ("39" like "sankyuu ...", like "Thanks Giving Day"). It featured a wide on stage transparent screen where Miku, Luka, Rin and Len sang some of their best known hits and not just hits, but many of those I like. Unlike some previous "live events", this time I wish I could be there.



Judging from the concert footage, over a thousand visitors attended and were very pleased with the show. The virtual stage was all for vocaloid, but the non-vocal part was performed in whole by live band as it seemed to me (I wonder who they were...) Even tho the sound quality is a quite poor it is not a waste of time to look at the video footage. I did get a concert feeling. They even faked the microphone too close to speakers feedback resonance :)

EDIT: As Sega is not interested in sharing the concert footage, it is eager to take down all the concert videos from Youtube. Unless they have plans to release the concert on DVD or Blue Ray, I don't understand their actions. But for introduction purposes I still try to keep some concert content in this playlist so that people far far away from Tokyo can get a bit of feeling what such a concert is. In good faith I believe that this does no harm.

The playlist has shrunk to the concert commercial, a small part of the concert and one interesting behind the scenes capture from one previous such event.



In case you're curious the official site is here (tho I guess it's not much useful any more).

EDIT: As I can see, Riho was also very interested in writing about this event. Honestly, I didn't know about that. :D

Vocaloid Madness

AS Toomas pointed out, there are no real animes about Miku, but there is the program called MikuMikuDance which in it's simplest form allows to make your character dance. If you are skilled enough and/or have enough patience, you can even make short clips with it and here is an example. It shows all of your favourite Vocaloid characters doing all kinds of weird things together and to each other with some funny narrative.



To say it is "chaotic" would be underrating it.

Merge!

Sharing a rare find of Aeris from VGCats comic and Miku merged together. Excellent work by the creator of VGCats Scott Ramsoomair!


Pic from here.

The Nearing Future City vocaloid fanime

There is no such thing as Vocaloid anime. Those videos you find in Youtube are just fan made videos accompanying some song, MMDs, parodys, "openings", "trailers", etc but none can be called "anime". I saw one calling such stuff fanime, so let me use that word too.

This one almost got me, it looks professional enough, long enough and has a story behind it. You may argue, but this is the most anime-like vocaloid video I've seen. Still, it is only fanime, but a good one. Whole 8 minutes of jazzy Miku and Meiko compilation for your enjoyment.



Music is by SuzukazeP [涼風P]. The songs are from Near Future City series (近未来都市シリーズ) witch you can start watching from here in NicoVideo. The whole concept also has a webpage where you can find songs and some artwork. The series is hard to follow in Youtube, but you can get something clicking here. I don't quite understand it, but it seems to a collection of songs in multiple albums. Still the whole theme promises more.

Here is one song pick from Youtube.



This may change since I haven't listen to all these songs, but one of my favorite is this (only in NicoVideo)

I guess it is not a coincidence, but the there is an animation Iron Giant from USA that is quite similar to the one used in the first video I posted here.

EDIT: Corrected one typo in the title. I am sorry for misunderstandings it caused.

Snow Miku

We've just got lots of snow, but some people out there have Snow Miku. She's huge, but cute still.





By gsc-mikatan? found here.

Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger

Recently I've gotten a bit addicted to some particular Vocaloid songs generated from midi. These are from one of the best PS1 RPG Chrono Chross and it's predecessor SNES game Chrono Trigger.

Chrono Chross "Radical Dreamers" cover by Miku.



I haven't played Chrono Trigger, but I do like this song "Corridors of Time". A 100% Miku-powered MIDI.



Another addictive one from Chrono Trigger: "Memories of Green"



I rarely encounter cosplays like the following. She doesn't play perfectly, but the effort is good. A Miku cosplayer playing Chrono Chross theme on violin!



(Audio jack of my laptop is getting more and more broken. Every time I hear something having not so good quality I try moving it. That's annoying!)

Appearance in Spore

This ancestor of Miku is a bit out of character compared to present day. Is she creepy or cute? You decide.



Spore is a multi-platform creature creation and evolution game. All these models and videos are created using the Spore Creature Creator. As it can be clearly seen, Spore adds its own touch to things.

Maybe a bit more "normal" Miku.


Compared to previous videos, Tako Luka fits very well into the setting.