Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Otaku-Friendly Windows 7

Official Microsoft Windows 7 Nanami Madobe OS-Tan wallpaper (background). If you want just this bg only (wide UXGA 2134 x 1200), you can get it here.

By now you would have heard of Windows 7, Microsoft's latest operating system, the 7th Windows release actually, which justifies them calling it Win7, when it's actually Windows 6.1. See our post here about it.

But did you know this is the first Windows to have an official OS-Tan by Microsoft and not by fans? Only in Japan for the first 7777 copies of Windows 7 Ultimate though. However, you can now get the Windows 7 OS-Tan Theme here on BrickTech to use on your non-Japan 7777 Windows 7. It might even work on Windows 6.0 (Vista) - give it a try!

Actually, it can work on ANY Windows if you just use the bundled wallpapers (or called background in Windows 7) and manually assign the OS-Tan voices to Windows events. But what is an OS-Tan?

OS-Tan is basically a personified OS, made popular by Japan, specifically for Windows, but it has now branched over into Apple's Macintosh OS, as well as Linux OS. They're usually all girls, to meet the fantasy of Otakus (Japanese geeks) of having an OS manifested as a human female.

In Resident Evil, the White Queen supercomputer is a young girl

In some ways they're the predecessor of science-fiction AI computers which can manifest themselves as a human, like the White Queen Computer from the Resident Evil series.

Apparently this is how Windows 7 looks like, and she's called Nanami Madobe, plus she looks VERY young.

To cater to this demand, Microsoft created an official Windows 7 character, Nanami Madobe, voiced by anime (Japanese animation) actress Nana Mizuki.

Nana Mizuki, the voice behind Windows 7

So, does that mean Windows 8 (or 9?) will have the ability to manifest itself as a holographic female personality? Well, we will have to wait and see! We can already expect the jokes of how a Windows AI will probably have mood swings to reflect if it has buggy codes within! ;p

More Data?