NTT's Pavilion at the Osaka-Kansai Expo: PARALLEL TRAVEL and the Future of ICT
The NTT Pavilion at the Osaka-Kansai Expo 2025 arrived as something more than a corporate exhibition. For NTT, the expo carried real historical weight: it was at the 1970 World Exposition that the company first demonstrated a wireless telephone — one of that era's defining technological moments. Fifty-five years later, NTT returned to an expo setting to present PARALLEL TRAVEL: a live demonstration of what comes next in human communication.
The pavilion's central thesis was direct: the barriers of distance and physicality that have defined communication since its beginning are now technically removable. Through the IOWN (Innovative Optical and Wireless Network) initiative and a platform of opto-electronic fusion devices, NTT is building the infrastructure that will make "being there" a near-physical sensation, regardless of where "there" actually is.
Visitors experienced this through real-time spatial transmission of a Perfume live rehearsal — video, audio, and haptic data transmitted from a distant studio and reconstructed in 3D at the pavilion with the precision that made the footsteps feel physically present in the room. This article examines what the pavilion demonstrated, the technology behind it, and what NTT's strategy signals for the future of global ICT.
- "PARALLEL TRAVEL": how NTT's pavilion redefined what communication can feel like
- The IOWN initiative and opto-electronic fusion devices: the new era of ICT infrastructure
- Global vision and future strategy: NTT's challenge to build a barrier-free communications world
- Summary
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"PARALLEL TRAVEL": How NTT's Pavilion Redefined What Communication Can Feel Like
The "PARALLEL TRAVEL" concept begins with a simple but ambitious proposition: technology should allow people to feel like they are in the same space, regardless of physical distance. The pavilion grounded visitors in the history of what that has meant across generations — letters, wireless telephony, smartphones — before showing what it can mean now.
The experience opened with a comprehensive display tracing how communication has evolved, from early written correspondence through the technological milestones that led to the present. This wasn't nostalgia — it was context. Each stage of the display made visible the wall that technology of that era was trying to break through. The PARALLEL TRAVEL theme asked: what is the wall today, and what does breaking through it actually look like?
The answer was delivered through spatial transmission technology. During the Perfume live rehearsal demonstration, every element of the performance environment — the spatial vibrations of each step, the way sound moved through the stage, the precise timing of lighting changes — was captured in the studio and transmitted to the pavilion in real time. The 3D reconstruction at the receiving end didn't feel like watching a video. It felt like being in the room.
Visitors wearing 3D glasses experienced the depth and presence that conventional 2D video fundamentally cannot deliver. The sensation was specifically constructed: not entertainment as an end in itself, but a demonstration that this quality of presence is now achievable across physical distance.
The interactive dimensions of the pavilion reinforced the theme. Visitors took their own photographs and watched them appear alongside others in a shared digital display — a small-scale version of the broader vision, demonstrating how personal identity and presence can extend into digital space. The combination of technical demonstration and personal participation gave the message an immediacy that a pure product showcase would not have achieved.
"PARALLEL TRAVEL" makes an argument: that communication's next stage is not faster data transfer, but the elimination of the felt distance between people. The pavilion provided the evidence for that argument through direct experience.
The IOWN Initiative and Opto-Electronic Fusion Devices: The New Era of ICT Infrastructure
The technical foundation of everything demonstrated at the pavilion is IOWN. The initiative's core shift: replacing electrical signal-based processing and transmission with optical signal-based equivalents. This change is not incremental — the physical properties of light (speed, bandwidth, power efficiency) open capabilities that electrical systems fundamentally cannot provide.
NTT's goal for the 2030s is to reduce ICT infrastructure power consumption to 1/100 of current levels. The expo pavilion included a dedicated exhibition demonstrating opto-electronic fusion devices — the first practical implementation of this approach — alongside comparison experiments showing how optical switching differs from electrical alternatives. Staff walked visitors through how the shift to optical signals enables data transmission with dramatically reduced latency, and how this affects the energy footprint of AI infrastructure and data centers.
The historical thread running through this exhibit was visible: from the wireless telephone at Expo 1970 to nationwide optical network deployment, through to the fusion devices on display today — each stage building the foundation for the next. The point was made explicitly by pavilion staff: the IOWN initiative is possible precisely because of the decades of optical communications research and infrastructure investment that preceded it.
Beyond raw performance, IOWN's architecture has structural implications. AI and digital twin technologies require infrastructure that supports not just data volume but the kind of rich, multimodal communication that PARALLEL TRAVEL demonstrated. IOWN is designed to support that. As data center power consumption becomes an increasingly serious constraint for enterprises and governments globally, NTT's progress toward a 1/100 power reduction target addresses a challenge that has no other clear technical solution at scale.
The IOWN roadmap is also a platform strategy: as the infrastructure matures, the range of applications it enables expands. The Perfume performance demonstration was one point on that curve. Medical applications, remote manufacturing supervision, real-time global collaboration — all of these become more technically tractable as IOWN-class infrastructure becomes available.
Global Vision and Future Strategy: NTT's Challenge to Build a Barrier-Free Communications World
The pavilion's final section turned from technology to strategy, with NTT's representative Yoshikawa outlining the company's long-term vision for what IOWN-class infrastructure makes possible at a global scale.
Yoshikawa's framing was notable: NTT sees itself as a "communications company" in the full sense — not just a network operator, but an organization with a mission to reduce the felt distance between people. In the current global environment, where economic and geopolitical uncertainty is generating friction across every kind of international relationship, Yoshikawa argued that technology capable of creating genuine presence across distance carries social significance well beyond its technical specifications.
The vision extends further than Earth. Yoshikawa discussed the possibility of communication with humans on the Moon or Mars feeling like adjacent presence — not as distant science fiction, but as a natural extension of the trajectory IOWN represents. The ambition is calibrated: this is where the technology points if the development program succeeds on its current trajectory.
The "Another Me Planet" virtual space introduced in the pavilion illustrated a different dimension of NTT's thinking. Visitors could create a digital version of themselves and receive a message — synthesized using NTT's voice synthesis technology — from that alternate self imagining a future career. The tsuzumi large language model enabled open-ended dialogue with this digital other. The point was not novelty but direction: NTT is working toward infrastructure where individual identity and emotional presence can extend into digital space in meaningful ways.
These demonstrations addressed a real challenge. The concern that AI-driven infrastructure development is consuming energy at a scale that becomes environmentally and economically unsustainable is not hypothetical — it is a pressing constraint for every organization building or operating at AI scale. NTT's response, through the IOWN power efficiency targets, is technically substantive rather than aspirational.
Yoshikawa's concluding message positioned NTT's investment not as a corporate initiative but as a contribution to a connected and sustainable global society. The communications company as infrastructure for human flourishing — that is the argument PARALLEL TRAVEL made from beginning to end.
Summary
The NTT Pavilion at the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo was one of its most technically ambitious exhibitions — grounded in a 55-year history of communications innovation and pointed firmly toward the next transformation.
The PARALLEL TRAVEL theme was earned: NTT demonstrated, through direct experience, what it looks like when distance stops being a wall. The Perfume performance reconstruction showed the technology functioning in conditions visitors could evaluate for themselves. The IOWN roadmap connected that demonstration to a systematic infrastructure development program with specific, measurable targets.
For business and technology professionals, the pavilion offered an early preview of communications infrastructure that will change what remote work, global collaboration, event experiences, and enterprise communications look like. NTT's convergence of technical capability, strategic investment, and clear social purpose makes it a development worth tracking closely.
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYNBWLNFmE
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