Interest

Auction Held to Be Life-Size Gundam's Virtual Pilot

Yahoo! Japan is currently holding an auction for someone to have his or her image projected from the cockpit section of the rebuilt life-size Gundam at the Gundam Front Tokyo at Diver City Tokyo. The auction, which opened on Thursday with a starting bid of 1 yen (US$0.01), currently has a bid of 507,000 yen (about US$6,348). The bid will end at 11:59 p.m. on May 16 in Japan.

The winning bidder will need to provide various images such as a full-body photograph, and photos from multiple angles of the face and hair. A digitally-rendered image will then be created of the winner and projected from the statue. The winning amount will be donated to charity to aid the victims of last year's earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

The opening ceremony for the unveiling of the completed Gundam statue last month had revealed a new feature of the Gundam statue. Unlike when the statue first appeared on Odaiba and later down south in Shizuoka, the statue now has an "opening" cockpit. No one can enter the cockpit though; the cockpit had "opened" during the ceremony to reveal an image of Amuro at the controls.

A video of an earlier test of the cockpit feature can be viewed below. A close-up image of the "opened" cockpit with the video image starts at 6:20 in the video.

[Via Yaraon!]