The archive · Content & Film · Technical decision · 2025
NTT transmits Perfume's whole live show across 20 km as 3D data — ACC 2025 Grand Prix
NTT's IOWN network sent an entire live Perfume concert — 3D space, voices, footstep vibrations — between two Expo sites in real time, a world first.
NTT · Perfume
What it had to solve
NTT wanted people to feel what its IOWN all-photonics network will do beyond 2D video. At Expo 2025 it connected the site of Expo '70 — where Perfume performed live — with its pavilion 20 km away on Yumeshima.
How it works
NTT's IOWN is a next-generation optical network built for a future beyond video calls — sharing entire 3D spaces with latency low enough for natural two-way communication. But an invisible network is hard to believe in, so at Expo 2025 Osaka NTT staged the future as a concert: Perfume performed live at Expo '70 Commemorative Park in Suita, and the entire space was transmitted in real time to the NTT Pavilion 20 km away on Yumeshima.
The transmission treated the performance as data. Seven units, each pairing a camera with three LiDAR sensors, scanned the stage as dynamic point clouds; 28 cameras tracked the members' positions; pin microphones carried their voices; and sensors on their boots captured every footstep. NTT's algorithms densified and denoised the point cloud in under 100 ms — inside the 200 ms budget for comfortable two-way communication — while a raised floor of 352 tiles reproduced the vibrations with localization, so up to 70 visitors at a time felt the beat and the direction of the dancers' steps.
Conducted on April 2, 2025 and streamed live on YouTube, it was described as the world's first transmission of an entire live space — 3D video, floor vibrations and lighting together. Replays ran at the pavilion throughout Expo. The project won the Grand Prix in Branded Communication (Digital & Social Craft) at the 2025 ACC Tokyo Creativity Awards, chosen from 2,263 entries, and the 2026 Digital Signage Award.
Why it lands
- It made an abstract network promise physical: audiences did not hear about IOWN's latency — they felt Perfume's footsteps through the floor.
- Connecting the 1970 and 2025 world expos gave the demo a built-in story: fifty-five years of communication progress in one performance.
- The spectacle was a working proof, not a mock-up — the production solved real problems in wide-area, low-latency 3D capture.
What it did
The April 2, 2025 transmission was called the world's first live relay of an entire spatial experience — 3D video, floor vibration and lighting together — and was streamed on YouTube with replays at the pavilion all through Expo. It won the 2025 ACC Tokyo Creativity Awards Grand Prix in Branded Communication (Digital & Social Craft) from 2,263 entries, plus the 2026 Digital Signage Award.
What you can take
To sell an invisible future network, make its promise feelable: transmitting presence itself — vibration, position, space — turned a latency spec into an experience audiences could believe.
Since then
The April 2025 performance was livestreamed on YouTube and archived on NTT's pavilion site, and visitors could experience replays throughout Expo 2025. The project took the Grand Prix at the 2025 ACC Tokyo Creativity Awards and the 2026 Digital Signage Award, and NTT positions the spatial-transmission technology behind it as a foundation for IOWN-based communication beyond sight and hearing — a demo that became a roadmap.
Sources
- ACC TOKYO CREATIVITY AWARDS ブランデッド・コミュニケーション部門にてIOWN×Perfumeが総務大臣賞／ACCグランプリを受賞
- IOWN × Spatial Transmission—A Communication Experience in Which Distant Spaces Become as One
- Panasonic's KAIROS powers world's first 'IOWN and Perfume' 3D live performance with 4K high-resolution video transmission real time
- IOWN×Perfumeの取り組みで「デジタルサイネージアワード」グランプリを受賞
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