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Bizarre Virtual 'Restaurant' Air Yakiniku a Huge Success

by Evan Shamoon on July 22, 2009 at 06:07 AM


Proving once and for all that perception is everything, Japanese virtual restaurant Air Yakiniku has become the 29th most searched site on Yahoo!. (Warning: Google Translator does little to help with this one.)

Allow us to explain. The virtual Korean BBQ restaurant, originally designed for the Japanese market, virtually hands its customers an apron, which they are asked to print out onto a sheet of paper and wear in order to prevent them from getting any virtual food on their clothing. Customers then choose their meat (sorry, vegetarians), which gets BBQ'd onscreen by a digital hand on a digital grill.

The idea is that visitors will have a bowl of rice and miso soup in front in order of them in order to heighten the experience's realism, though we're not sure what one does with all of the saliva and expectation that's built up by the time the bell dings to inform them that their meat is done (and, of course, nonexistent).

There are other virtual restaurants out there, and virtual bars are starting to catch on as well. There, we presume, you can get virtually drunk, virtually hit on members of the opposite sex, and, if you're lucky, maybe even virtually take one of them home with you. [From: Air Yakiniku, via NY Times]

Tags: air yakiniku, AirYakiniku, biginjapan, food, japan, japanese, restaurant, top, virtual reality, VirtualReality, web site, WebSite, weird

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