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Anime Boston - Anime Crash Panel

First, there was plenty of talk about Geisters. The series is due out starting on June 1st and will run six volumes for the entire series and will be released on a six week release schedule. Dub fans will note that all of the dubbing was done in-house and not by any known studio. Each of the six volumes will include a premium collectible figure, about 3-4 inches tall and there will be a send-away with the last volume to get a larger more articulate figure.

Anime Crash also announced the acquisition of Key Fighter, a more children's oriented anime series.

One of the more unknown things that they had talked about prior to the convention was their "talking manga" plans, something that was sort of hard to wrap your head around until you see the reality of it. Well, having seen the reality of it I have to admit I'm very intrigued by it, but more so by the applications of the product itself than with the manga specifically.

Essentially, the entire thing is based around a product called T-ink. The ink basically is a circuit board in a sense and you can set it to be reactive to specific things, such as skin. So if you have a page of manga, you can have a word bubble with text written in it. When you touch it, it could say that. Or it could be a sound effect and you slide your finger across it to have it make that sound. The ink is currently in use in a variety of toys, of which you can see a U.S. style one here. Anime Crash had a couple of units that Bandai Japan is using to sell using Hello Kitty. The coloring pages slide on the clipboard and the kids color it. But if you touch certain areas, such as Hello Kitty herself, she says "Wai!". Of course, everyone hits that spot several times, so it goes "Wai! Wai! Wai! Wai! Wai!" really fast and it's great.

This obviously has some great childrens oriented application. I could easily see this being a great thing with my own kids and am going to be searching some of them out to complement their other toys. James Veronico of Anime Crash talked of other applications, such as the ink on top of glass in buildings, such as a glass wall where tapping a section could give you directions or other information on how to get some place. The ink is also able to be produced using vegetable oils which means there's all sorts of packaging possibilities with fruits and vegetables and candies.

Another application is with DVD. The Geisters case, which is similar to some of the older Disney DVD cases that were done for family titles in that they were white and kind of soft, is one of them. Inside the case is the battery (each battery is considered good for something like 100,000 uses I believe). When you touch the front cover of Geisters Volume #1, it says "Geisters!". On the back, you could set areas such as the discs features or artwork to provide more information. Thankfully you cannot activate the sound through the plastic on the packaging, so you can't go into a retailer and activate a hundred packages at once unless you tear off the wrapping.

Essentially, I just found the uses and potential application of this really neat. The manga side that's being worked on has two batteries being worked on that are even thinner so that they can form the spine of a tankoubon in Japan and double the number of uses. At this time, there are plans for this to only be done in Japan though there are hopes and designs to introduce it to the US market as well.

Wai!