Angelic Layer and Science

It might not have come out yet in this blog, but my wife and I are huge anime fans. I've been watching just about anything that I can from shows on cartoon network, Adult Swim, Netflix rentals, YouTube (Japanese recordings with English Text) and even a fan site BleachPortal.net to get in my fix of anime.


I search for anime shows that my son can watch. I'll let him watch stuff that is much more violent than most parents - I don't believe that what people watch on TV leads to what people do in reality. If this were the case then it would be quite clear that Japanese culture should be far more violent than United States Culture - and this is directly opposite to available information.

To the topic of this particular post: Angelic Layer is a low-violence and low-person violence anime that my son likes to watch. Young children control dolls on a field called the Angelic Layer where those dolls become capable of following the user's mind commands to do things on the layer. There is a lot more to this show, like a slight sexual tension between the main character and one of the male characters that so far in two disks hasn't resulted in anything more than a he likes her - and the guy getting all embarrassed. The main story line follows the main character as her doll battles other dolls on the Angelic Layer and she becomes a competition player. So, the violence that does happen in the show are dolls fighting dolls, no blood, still a little violence; however, it is clear on the show that the fighters are not people - even though they look like people.

Recently there have been articles like this one - depicting a game system with an add-on device that allows the user to use their mind to control the actions of their character inside of a console game. This immediately brought to my mind the idea of Angelic Layer. The art of moving things in the real world is far more difficult (especially given the activities of the dolls in Angelic Layer) than moving pixels in a game.

On the other hand, we are increasingly becoming more capable in the robotic arena. If this is the direction we are going with in gaming, there isn't a reason why we couldn't in ten years create something very much like Angelic Layer.