No idea how the hell I let this one slip, but here's the thing: a few days ago, Production I.G announced a new anime in collaboration with Shirow Masamune, who of course is the creator of the Ghost in the Shell franchise (and the imminent Ghost Hound, which is premiering next week). Their latest joint project is called Real Drive (or RD Sennou Chousashitsu for you nippophiles), a pretty misleading title for another sci-fi cyber-centric story - full overview inside.

Real Drive will start airing in Japan on NTV around April 2008. It will be directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi (Le Chevalier D'Eon), with a screenplay by Junichi Fujisaku - who previously wrote the script for some GitS: Stand Alone Complex episodes, and also directed Blood+. There are a couple of websites set up on NTV and Production I.G, but there's not much to see there yet, other than this pic here:

"2061 AD. Fifty years have passed since mankind developed the Network society. It was anticipated that this new infrastructure would realize a utopia where people connected with each other at the level of consciousness. However, new social problems such as personal data leaks and proliferation of manipulated information began to surface.

Nevertheless, people still relied on the Network to exchange information, and proved unable to opt to abandon it.

In due course, a new Network realm with more effective security measures was developed. This was called Meta Real Network, usually abbreviated as "the Metal."

The Metal accommodated personal memory data within protected virtual stand-alone organic cyber enclaves called bubble shells and eventually pervaded the everyday lives of people.

However, people gradually learned to release and explode their instincts within the secure environment of the Metal. The unleashed instincts pushed each individual's consciousness to drown in the sea of information and to be exposed to the pressures of desire. Meanwhile, norms and regulations continued to bind their real world lives. Thus, strange friction between the two worlds began to manifest themselves as aberrations beyond the bounds of the imaginable.

Experts who challenged the deep sea of the Metal to investigate and decipher such aberrations were called cyber divers.

This is a story of a cyber diver, Masamichi Haru, who investigates the incidents that lie between Reality and the Metal."