3D interactive campus guide to help students out

Have you ever been on campus, lost and forlorn, wishing you had a cute Oriental girl with a comforting voice to guide you and tell you where to go next? Wow, you have? Okay, that's messed up. But either way, you'll love Mei-Chan, the interactive 3D guide developed by the Nagoya Institute of Technology to aid students and visitors on campus, give them directions and answer their queries.

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Mei-Chan herself (or itself, whichever way you'd like to put it) is an anime girl who answers queries with realistic gestures. You wouldn't expect less from a Japanese college now, would you? A lot of work has been put into making Mei-Chan as life-like as possible. The basic premise of the system is simple. There are two screens, with the girl on the right, and all the information she's offering you on the left. Voice recognition and speech-synthesis systems make communication easy, and the graphics have been programmed using OpenGL.

It's awesome to see virtual 3-D guides replacing the simple "You-are-here" billboards at the likes of the Nagoya Institute of Technology, and Mei-Chan is a concept that could easily be extended further, not just to campuses, but even malls and museums, to name a few. Let's just hope things don't get too lifelike, because we might have social outcasts hogging the virtual guide-booths thinking they finally have a girlfriend.

Via : ITMedia/Dvice