The official
Twitter
account for
Crypton Future Media
's Vocaloid2 CV series of virtual singer software
confirmed
on Thursday that the
Facebook
account for the Hatsune Miku character has over 39,390 fans. The
Facebook
account
added
that the staff will "officially inform that 'Hatsune Miku sings in English' later." Crypton President
Hiroyuki It?
h had revealed at New York Comic Con last month that his company is planning a English version of Hatsune Miku, and he asked for 39,390 fans to show their support on
Facebook
to demonstrate the demand. (The number 39 can be read in Japanese as "Miku" or "thank you" or
sanky?
.)
Cyberpunk Author
William Gibson
on Hatsune Miku
In a separate development,
William Gibson
? one of the earliest authors in the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction ?
posted
on his
Twitter
account on November 10 that "Hatsune Miku doesn't really rock me. I want higher rez, less anime." The artist Hibiki Chikada
told
Gibson, "Hatsune Miku is repeatedly copied on the net and thus reproducing herself. Infos attached by fans get her higher resolution," to which Gibson
replied
, "So Hatsune Miku involves some sort of ongoing crowd-sourced evolution?" Other
posters
explained
the
phenomenon
further
to Gibson.
Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" and his first novel, 1984's
Neuromancer
, influenced science fiction in English and Japanese, particularly in anime and games. (Crypton's Itoh
noted
that he read
Neuromancer
20 years ago.) Gibson has said since the 1980s that modern Tokyo represented and continues to represent the future of human society and technology. He wrote a novel called
Idoru
about a Japanese virtual idol singer named "Rei Toei" in 1996, although
Eve
from
Megazone 23
, Sharon Apple from
Macross Plus
, and
Key the Metal Idol
predated the novel. (Coincidentally, in
Key the Metal Idol
, the title character must gain 30,000 friends to become human.) The same year that
Idoru
was published,
HoriPro
debuted the virtual singer Kyoko Date in Japan.
Hatsune Miku in World Media
The Japanese blog Temple Knights has
collected
YouTube
videos of news reports on Hatsune Miku from Poland, Spain, Romania, Mexico, and Brazil:
In the above video, a newscaster for the Polish television news program
Panorama
reports on a recent 'concert' performed by virtual idol Hatsune Miku. The concert's original
production
took place in Japan in August 2009 with an audience of over 25,000. The concert has been reproduced in
San Francisco
and
New York
.
[Via Temple Knights (
link 2
,
link 3
),
leetNEET
]