Recently, Danny had partnered up with Japanese figure maker Kotobukiya to gather information about otaku from around the world. This information, along with pictures of the various otaku rooms would be published later this year in a book called OTACOOL – Worldwide Otaku Rooms. To kick things off, he’d asked the winning entrants from his “My Room” contest to upload higher resolution photos to his new figure.fm site. From the initial sets, images would be chosen for the cover of the book. Presently, here’s what the cover for the book looks like:
If it stays that way, then I’ll have made the cover! The top left image is a shot of the lounge, complete with cat! As cool as it is, I would have preferred that they used a different image, I’m particularly fond of the nigh time shots, which show the display cases all lit up. It seems that Danny is partial to those pictures too, as one of them wound up being used in the banner for the Otacool portal.
The other nifty thing about this whole experience is that some of the photos collected will be slated for use in other Kotobukiya marketing material, pamphlets, posters, etc. Who knows, maybe on a future trip to Japan I’ll see an image of my otaku lounge blown up and plastered on the side of a building…
…That’s a scary prospect, actually…
Regardless, I’m very excited to hear about the final selections. A lot of the submissions look amazing and a lot of fellow DCers have really impressive living areas. Hopefully I’ll also be able to pick up a copy of the book once it’s finished. I’ve also realized that being a part of this online community has had the effect of encouraging me to become a bit neater upstairs. I’m tidying up a bit more, in the event I need to do an impromptu photo session (like last night and this evening).
To see my entries for Otacool, check out here (original) and here (updated last night). I’d also uploaded the rest of the photo set here.
Lastly, since I now had enough decorations and detail in the upstairs area, I finally was able to pull off a decent Photosynth set (Photosynth uses photos to generate a sort of “3D virtual tour”). See the Synth here (Silverlight required).
Since I have so much IKEA furniture making up the otaku lounge, I wonder if I can get them to sponsor it…? 🙂
How Do You Figure? 
Ed, one of the main reasons I always liked your setup is that it is neat and ordered. Many others are quite messy(cough LS cough ^^ ). Not really a fan of the ones with stuff clumped together all over. Taking time to organize and clean impress me the most ^^; Will be interesting to see who are the 6 Kotobukiya picks. Hopefully you and I!
I need another Detolf too ;; Tempted to get some plexiglass and turn a bookshelf into a dust-free display ^^
Well, to be fair, it’s easier to have more space and spread things out when you’re independent, live on your own, and have a steady income. I think the majority of the users there are still living with parents and/or college students, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to have entire houses or apartments to decorate…
I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I run out of display space this time. I think I’m really at my limit as to how many DETOLFs I can have…
True, most are probably still with parents. You should of seen my dorm room though and apartment with 4 people. I use to have every square inch of wall space covered with posters. I got a bit annoyed at having to put up 500+ posters and liked the look of frames so I switched to that. I’ll eventually move on to better frames ^^; I also can’t use an entire wall here because of this old 1950s metal heater covering the wall. Going to be getting it removed in the next month though and all my detolfs will be lined up there. ^^
You got plenty of space for more detolfs though. I can see it in the images! ^^ I kept all the inserts and covers for all my anime DVDs and instead put the discs all in two 350 DVD boxes. Makes bringing them along anywhere far easier and takes up 1/100th the space of all the boxes XD
Was tempted to get some empty boxes and put them all back in for the room contest but reinserting 400+ DVD covers back into their cases and then putting the DVDs in the case was just way to much of a hassle 😡 I still have a giant box in my closet with collector edition box set cases. I’ve tossed quite a few of them though because they were just taking up space XD.
True, I too like the clean and refined look of Ed’s setup. Well done! ^^
I was actually surprised at the angle they used for my room… but then again there wasn’t really any good angles of my room ^^;;