IBM Japan announced a new massively multiplayer online (MMO) game virtual reality project called Sword Art Online: The Beginning that will make use of IBM’s cognitive computing artificial intelligence Watson and the company’s high-function cloud service SoftLayer. In an almost science fiction move, the company is putting together two of the most powerful systems on the planet to create a video game that’s also about VR and AI.

The official website (Japanese) states that the game’s mission is to become the first test case for a VRMMO based on the world of Sword Art Online, an anime of the same name that is also about people trapped and living within a virtual reality MMO video game. Registration for a Tokyo-based event participants is already online and the window is March 18 through 20, 2016.

The game is expected to support both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive at time of launch.

Similar to the anime, players will also be able to use a 3D scanning camera to produce an online avatar of themselves for playing within the game, as reported by Siliconera. The game will also eschew controllers, opting to allow players to control the game with their own body movements in order to increase the perception of immersion.

Japanese author Reki Kawahara, writer of Sword Art Online and Accel World, said about early trials of the game that it would be “something completely foreign from any other video game experience,” and “by getting to experience being chased by a monster, I hope people will wonder more about the future of virtual reality gaming.”

The cloud and AI for a good mix for a video game

IBM hopes to use this project to show how Watson and SoftLayer’s cloud platform can be used to produce a global phenomena for video gamers. The choice of an MMO for coupling these technologies is also an obvious choice: MMO games have a global reach and often need to support hundreds to thousands of players concurrently.

IBM’s SoftLayer cloud is an attractive technology for video game assets because of its global reach and concurrency capability, in 2014, KUULUU and Multiplay came to join on SoftLayer’s cloud platform to support video gaming experiences.

And as for IBM’s Watson, as an AI-as-a-Service the system could be used to support extensive and procedural content generation for players in an ever-expanding world. An excellent potential example of this use can be seen in a previous City of Paradigm story written on SiliconANGLE. A cognitive computing system could be used to anticipate user interest in particular regions of an MMO universe and tailor it to respect curiosity, add content on the fly and even provide dialogue options to non-player characters (NPCs) to make the world appear more vibrant and alive.

Watson in particular works by combining a large corpus of data with natural language processing, which means that it could be used as an interface to keep players engaged with the Sword Art Online game world. Player activity and communication with game assets produces a great deal of unstructured data and Watson is perfect for dealing with that sort of data (as seen when IBM displayed Watson as a Jeopardy champion and potential healthcare asset).

For the reason that Sword Art Online, the TV show, is set in a virtual reality game world itself this is the perfect storm for IBM to combine these technologies. Sword Art Online already has a strong fanbase and it grows out of a tradition lead by other popular anime such as .hack//Sign and Accel World (mentioned above).

Featured image credit: Sword Art Online: The Beginning sponsored by IBM, video.