Vocaloid
Originally, Hiroyuki Ito—President of Crypton Future Media—claimed that Hatsune Miku was not a virtual idol but a kind of the Virtual Studio Technology instrument. However, Hatsune Miku performed her first "live" concert like a virtual idol on a projection screen during Animelo Summer Live at the Saitama Super Arena on August 22, 2009. At the "MikuFes '09 (Summer)" event on August 31, 2009, her image was screened by rear projection on a mostly-transparent screen. Miku also performed her first overseas live concert on November 21, 2009, during Anime Festival Asia (AFA) in Singapore. On March 9, 2010, Miku's first solo live performance titled "Miku no Hi Kanshasai 39's Giving Day" was opened at the Zepp Tokyo in Odaiba, Tokyo. The tour was run as part of promotions for Sega's "Hatsune Miku: Project Diva" video game in March 2010. The success and possibility of these tours is owed to the popularity of Hatsune Miku and so far Crypton is the only studio to have established a world tour of their Vocaloids.
Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA
As the game is a rhythm game, players are allowed to choose from a wide variety of Vocaloid songs, original songs sung by Vocaloids, including songs sung by Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin and Len. Players also can choose which character they wish to play in the game. Known as modules, these modules can be completely different characters or simply different costumes for the same characters. These modules, though not directly controlled by the player, will be the ones appearing in the music videos throughout the game including their specific costumes. For example, if the player chooses Kagamine Rin for their first character and Hatsune Miku for their second character, during solo songs only Kagamine Rin appears in the video but for duets both Hatsune Miku and Kagamine Rin will appear in the video. Each of the songs have their own difficulties which are Easy, Normal, Hard and Extreme. Initially both the Easy and Normal difficulties of a song are unlocked, upon clearing the Normal difficulty, the Hard difficulty will be unlocked and so forth. Players progress through the game by completing songs and unlocking more new songs until they eventually unlock all songs.
The game's gameplay is similar to that of other rhythm games in which players must press a series of buttons according to the sequence on the screen. The game primarily makes use of the 4 main symbols, X, circle, square and triangle, which are the face buttons for the PlayStation Portable. Various floating gray buttons of those symbols will appear on the screen, and the colored version of those symbols will begin to float in from the various sides of the screen. The player is required to press the face button once the colored symbol lands on its grayed version and based on the player's timing their accuracy is rated. Accuracy is described with a word displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen, ranging from "Cool" to "Miss". The game is scored on accuracy and the player is awarded with a rank ranging from "Perfect" to "Dropout" (denoted by "DropXOut"). It also includes a chance mode whereby the combo system compounds points earned, for example one perfect note gives the player 100 points, if they have a combo of 34 notes, the 34th note alone gives them an additional 3400 points.