The name of Tetsuya Mizuguchi, designer of synesthetic surreality trips Rez and Lumines, is already familiar to gamers. So is Japan's popular weekly game mag, Famitsu, which reports that Mizuguchi's agreed to collaborate with Japanese ad agency Dentsu to build a virtual Tokyo in Second Life.

No word on Dentsu's specific long-term biz plan for the virtual city, but the marriage of game design aesthetic with online architecture certainly sounds like fun. Mizuguchi was initially wary of the idea and declined, but later changed his mind, relenting, "My work all these years has been to entertain people through video games, but this Virtual Tokyo concept could be the next step and path."

Mizuguchi and Dentsu also discussed plans to open a Ski Jump Pair International contest in the heart of virtual Tokyo, inspired by artist Riichiro Mashima's Ski Jump Pairs. According to Mizuguchi, a giant ski slope in the heart of Virtual Tokyo will be the site of an international competition where users' ski-posing avatars "will compete based on longest distance, landing, comedic performance and so on. We've already been running tests in Second Life and this is quite fun. We hope to do this contest regularly."

Interestingly, rather than attempting to replicate the real-world Tokyo, Mizuguchi and Dentsu have designs on a city that, like a "museum of Japanese culture," captures its image and feel. "How do people in Tokyo perceive the city? How about foreigners?" Mizuguchi wonders. "That's what we want to express."

[Via 1Up]