Leave it up to Japanese companies to promote a new form of technology with a certain flair. A pop-up ninja booth at Chubu airport in Nagoya aims to give passers-by a glimpse at what virtual reality technology is really capable of. By actively having a ninja at the boot, the company responsible for this VR effort knows how to attract an audience.
Getting People Excited With Ninjas
One has to commend every company which takes a somewhat unusual approach toward advertising VR technology. This idea can be tackled from many different angles. A pop-up ninja store is one guaranteed way of getting attention, even in Japan. The booth will only be around for a month and aims to attract tourists to nearby cities. This is done by giving viewers a small VR experience documenting the famous ninja history of Iga and Koka.
As users wear a VR headset, they will take a virtual world and transformed into a ninja themselves. Their objective is to battle monsters with shuriken. It lasts for a total of five minutes, and the VR experience can be accessed in Japanese, English, or Chinese. Completing the game receives users with a free coupon for the Ninja Museum of Igaryu and Koka Ninja Village. A remarkable promotional campaign which can be quite beneficial to both cities.
Attracting tourists has been an ongoing struggle for a lot of regions. Not because people wouldn’t care about the history, lore, and sightseeing, but primarily because it is so difficult to get the word out there. Virtual reality is a medium which lends itself quite well to storytelling and taking people to a different virtual world altogether. As such, it is a valuable tool for tourism.
Whether or not this technology will be successful in the long run, remains to be determined. Considering how there is an incentive to ensure people check out the VR experience, it will undoubtedly get some attention moving forward. At the same time, there are still a lot of aspects of virtual reality which tend to annoy a lot of people. As such, experiments like these may not necessarily pan out that well.
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