Japan Studio VR Music Festival Announced at TGS 2017

While I didn’t expect any Gravity Rush related news at the Tokyo Game Show 2017 Playstation conference, it turns out that Kat did in fact make an appearance. During the conference Sony has announced the Japan Studio VR Music Festival, which as the title suggests is a VR experience using Sony’s PlayStation VR headset. As demonstrated in the newly released trailer which you can see below, the music festival will give viewers a look at 14 songs that were performed during the Game Symphony Japan 23rd concert, held in May 2017. These include songs from Sony Japan Studio games such as ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian, Wild Arms and of course Gravity Rush and Gravity Rush 2.

However, it’s not actually a traditional 3D VR video where you appear to sit in the audience of the actual concert. Instead, it’s more like you’re in a cinema and watching a recording of the concert. You’re seated in a 3D area where multiple screens are positioned in front of you, and the center screens is showing a recording of the concert. The other screens show content such as artwork and gameplay from the games of which the songs are being performed. PlayStation mascots Toro and Kuro can also be seen hanging around the area. The show will last around 30 minutes.

PS+ subscribers in Japan will get access to the VR Music Festival starting September 20th (meaning today in Japan at the time of writing), one month ahead of the general audience. So it looks like the next thing I’ll be doing is looking up how to get a Japanese PS+ subscription. At the moment there’s no word on whether or not this VR Music Festival will be released outside of Japan, but I do hope we’ll see an English release.