NTT Pavilion at Osaka Expo 2025: The Future of Communications Technology and IOWN
NTT Group's participation in the Osaka-Kansai Expo 2025 carried historical weight. At the 1970 Osaka World Exposition, the company demonstrated wireless telephony — a technology that was then genuinely visionary. Fifty-five years later, NTT returned to an expo setting with three interconnected propositions about what communication becomes when the underlying infrastructure shifts from electrical to optical.
Those three propositions were: transmitting presence (the sensation of someone being near, not merely a representation of them); connecting space itself (transmitting the full three-dimensional environment of a location in real time); and sharing location (enabling people with physical constraints to participate fully in digital and physical space). Each was demonstrated not as a concept but as a working system.
The technical foundation enabling all three is IOWN — the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network initiative — which NTT has been developing to replace electrical signal processing with optical signal processing. The implications for latency, bandwidth, and power consumption are significant. The pavilion made those implications tangible.
- Transmitting presence: heartbeat-sharing technology
- Connecting space: LiDAR-based spatial transmission and the Perfume demonstration
- Sharing location: DJ MASA and myoelectric avatar technology
- IOWN and smart city implementation at the expo venue
Transmitting Presence: Heartbeat-Sharing Technology
The centerpiece of the pavilion's first concept was a heartbeat-sharing system. A visitor places a stethoscope against their chest; the heartbeat signal is transmitted as light and vibration to a glowing ball, which then carries that signal in real time to a remote location. The effect was described consistently by participants as physically different from any previous digital communication experience: not hearing about someone's heartbeat, but feeling it as a physical presence.
A proof-of-concept demonstration was conducted at the United Nations headquarters in New York in 2025, where children in Tokyo and New York shared heartbeats across a 10,000-kilometer distance. The children didn't share a language or prior relationship. The heartbeat transmission created a form of understanding that those barriers didn't prevent. NTT researchers working on haptic and wellbeing applications describe this as a distinct category — not information transfer, but the transfer of physiological presence.
Intended applications extend across several sectors. In elderly care, maintaining emotional connection with dementia patients through biometric signals offers continuity when language-based communication becomes difficult. In remote medical contexts, a specialist receiving real-time sensory information from a patient's environment can make more precise assessments than video alone allows. In education and remote work, biometric feedback enables instructors and managers to read attention and stress states accurately enough to respond in real time.
From a technical standpoint, this system requires ultra-low latency that current electrical-signal infrastructure cannot consistently deliver. IOWN's optical processing addresses that constraint directly — the physical properties of light allow the precision required.
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Connecting Space: LiDAR-Based Spatial Transmission
The pavilion's second demonstration addressed what communication looks like when the unit being transmitted is not an image or a video stream but an entire three-dimensional space.
The Perfume 25th anniversary live performance provided the demonstration vehicle. Five LiDAR sensors scanned the performance space and all performers in three dimensions in real time, generating a dataset that was transmitted and reconstructed as a navigable CG environment. Audience members viewing the reconstruction could choose their own viewpoint — angle, distance, perspective — rather than being limited to a camera operator's choices.
The difference from conventional live streaming is not incremental. Standard streaming transmits a two-dimensional representation of what one camera recorded. LiDAR-based spatial transmission transmits the geometry of the space itself: the precise three-dimensional position and shape of every object, every moving performer, every environmental detail. The receiving environment isn't watching a recording of a space — it's inhabiting a reconstruction of it.
Potential applications range widely. For entertainment: artist reach is no longer constrained by venue capacity or geography. For medical training: surgical teams in different locations can observe the same procedure from their own chosen vantage points. For architecture and manufacturing: design models and actual construction sites can be compared and verified against each other in real time. For education: historical sites, museums, and scientific environments can be experienced as spatial presences rather than visual representations.
The data volumes involved are orders of magnitude larger than conventional video. Processing and transmitting them without perceptible delay requires infrastructure that electrical-signal systems cannot provide. IOWN's optical bandwidth is designed for this class of requirement.
Sharing Location: DJ MASA and Myoelectric Avatar Technology
The pavilion's third concept was the one that most directly addressed questions of inclusion and physical constraint. MASA is a DJ with ALS — a progressive neurodegenerative disease that progressively removes voluntary muscle control. The project developed for MASA captures myoelectric signals (the minute electrical currents generated by muscle tissue) from the parts of his body that retain some function, and uses those signals to drive a digital avatar in real time.
The avatar can perform movements that MASA's physical body cannot currently produce. At the Ars Electronica festival in Austria — one of the world's most recognized media arts events — MASA's past voice recordings were used alongside cross-lingual speech synthesis technology to enable him to communicate in English in his own voice. The performance received a response that went beyond the technical demonstration.
What this project demonstrates is not primarily a medical aid — it's a statement about what technology enables at the intersection of creativity and constraint. The desire to make music did not diminish as ALS progressed. The technology found a route around the physical barrier. In principle, the same approach extends to visual artists, writers, filmmakers, and any creator whose physical function has been altered.
Social and practical applications beyond art are also in scope. Muscle function loss from aging, rehabilitation contexts, and workplace adaptation for people with physical disabilities are all areas where myoelectric-to-avatar translation creates new possibilities. The technical components — precision low-signal biosensing, personalized machine learning models, ultra-low-latency processing — all require the kind of infrastructure IOWN is built to provide.
IOWN and Smart City Implementation at the Expo Venue
The expo grounds themselves served as an IOWN smart city demonstration. NTT integrated foot traffic data, environmental data, and facility operation data using optical processing across the venue, enabling real-time optimization of visitor routing, resource allocation, and environmental management.
The Personal Agent application available to expo visitors was one visible expression of this infrastructure. The app provided AI-driven daily route recommendations based on individual preference patterns, real-time crowd visualization for optimal routing, and AR-based navigation. These are not novel capabilities individually — but their integration as a unified, real-time platform running at expo scale demonstrated IOWN's capacity under real operational conditions.
A virtual expo environment was also constructed: a three-dimensional digital replica of the physical venue where visitors who couldn't attend in person — due to physical distance, health constraints, or disability — could navigate as avatars and experience the expo spatially. This dual function — as a marketing tool for the physical event and as an inclusion mechanism for those who couldn't attend — reflects NTT's stated positioning: not just a network operator, but an organization working to eliminate the barriers that separate people from each other and from shared experience.
NTT's broader portfolio of expo-related activities included Web3 and XR business development, aerospace ventures, data center operations, energy services, and smart city consulting. The pavilion was one node in a larger technical and strategic demonstration.
Summary
NTT's 2025 expo pavilion made an argument with working technology: that the next generation of communication is not about faster data transfer but about eliminating the felt distance between people. The heartbeat system showed what presence looks like when it's transmitted as sensation. The LiDAR spatial transmission showed what location looks like when it's transmitted as space rather than image. DJ MASA's performance showed what participation looks like when physical constraint is routed around rather than accepted.
IOWN is the infrastructure that makes these things possible. The shift from electrical to optical signal processing is not a refinement of current systems — it's a change in what the systems can do. The expo demonstrated that some of what they can now do is genuinely new.
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkPBSZWPvi0&t=2s
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