The archive · Public & Social · Product decision · 2023–2025
NTT's Project Humanity gives ALS DJ MASA a full-body avatar for live sets
An NTT tool reads the tiny muscle signals left in MASA's limbs and drives a digital avatar, letting the ALS-bound EYE VDJ play whole-body DJ sets again.
NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) · WITH ALS
What it had to solve
In ALS the motor neurons that move the body age and the whole body gradually becomes immobile, while consciousness, the five senses and intelligence stay healthy. MASA, an EYE VDJ living with ALS, still had a performer's craft and an audience — but no body that could play a live set.
How it works
ALS is an incurable disease in which the motor neurons that move the body age, and the whole body gradually becomes immobile — yet consciousness, the five senses and intelligence remain healthy. For MASA, an EYE VDJ living with ALS, the disease threatened exactly the thing his craft ran on: a body that could move a crowd.
The answer was not a wheelchair or a voice interface but a body again. NTT and its partners built a tool that detects minute changes in electromyography signals in the limbs and converts them into the motion of a digital avatar. MASA then used his entire body to create a DJ performance: whatever signals still fired inside him drove the avatar, and the set excited the audience as much as his performances once had.
The D&AD page frames the tool as a route to participation rather than a demo: the project aims at a world where people with ALS do not have to give up physical expression. The work is archived by D&AD under Experiential: Activation & Participation, with client credit to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone; the page records no audience or reach figures.
Why it lands
- It starts from what remains — minute electromyography signals in the limbs — instead of cataloguing what ALS took away.
- The avatar restores whole-body physicality, so the performance and the crowd reaction stay intact rather than shrinking to a cursor or a voice.
- The system was built around a working artist with a real craft and a live audience, so the tool had to be expressive enough for a DJ set, not just functional enough for a lab.
- For a telecom brand, the experience turned R&D about human connection into something an audience could feel, making the technology the story instead of the spec sheet.
What it did
The tool gave back a form of expression ALS had taken: MASA performed a whole-body DJ set through the avatar and the audience reacted as excitedly as before. The project's stated aim is a world where people with ALS do not have to give up physical expression; the D&AD page records no audience or reach figures.
What you can take
When illness takes the body, redesign the interface before abandoning the activity: find the signals that still fire, give them an avatar, and a person's craft can survive the disease.
Since then
The D&AD archive entry presents the tool and MASA's avatar DJ performance as the project's proof point: physical expression remains possible when the body fails. The same page states the ambition — people with ALS never having to give up physical expression — and credits Nippon Telegraph and Telephone as client; it records no later chapters, audience numbers or awards details.
Sources
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