Japanese government commissions baffling metaverse to combat loneliness where you can't talk to anyone, enforced via a digital security guard

An image of an empty, isolated presentation room where you aren't allowed to, uh, talk to anybody.

Feeling lonely? How does driving a little pixel avatar around in a place you're explicitly not allowed to talk to anybody in sound? Bad, probably, but that hasn't stopped the Japanese government from making it.

As spotted (and translated) by Automaton West, the already ill-fated project goes by the name of "Platt-verse", and is designed to strengthen "measures against loneliness and isolation", as per its website. Noritoshi Furuichi, an author and sociologist, took it for a spin—and tore it apart in a tweet (the following quotes have been machine-translated).