The Osaka Virtual Expo 2025 is a fully playable video game

I love trade fairs and expos in the world. I've always wanted to visit one and this year I finally had the chance – at least virtually. The Osaka World Expo, a Mega exhibition entitled “Designing Future Society for our Lives”, will be organized by 28 million visitors from October 13th to 13th. However, the online Osaka Virtual Expo could attract over 250 million, so that people who cannot travel to Japan can experience the Expo and almost quadruple the personal presence record set by Shanghai Expo 2010.

The massive public events have defined and redefined our modern world. The Osaka Expo 2025 has been marked for 174 years since the legendary London exhibition from 1851, in which modern architecture in the form of glass and iron -“Crystal Palace” was born, and for 55 years since the Osaka Expo 1970, where wireless phones, electric cars and moving spaces were first exhibited to the public. In the 20th century it remains one of the most spectacular displays of art, architecture and technology.

In 2020, the Dubai Expo was forced online due to Covid-19, and the digital version attracted around 250 million from all over the world. The 4.38-square-kilometer physical website in Dubai was submitted to the living room of the visitors after moving the pandemic in Dubai in Dubai in Dubai with Google Maps' Street View and 360-degree pictures. However, the Osaka Expo is the first fully virtual expo with a complete, dedicated video game app.

These types of online environments were new before the 2020 closures when they suddenly increased and immediately became unbearable because each exhibition had an in-browser version. Facebook jumped onto the train and renamed Meta. It quickly became clear that the metaverse was not in a place where people wanted to spend significant time to shop or hang up. However, if these online environments are done correctly, they are characterized to reproduce exhibitions and expand their reach. Now visitors don't have to travel to Osaka to experience at least part of the Expo. And it can live online forever, long after the physical pavilions have been shut down and deconstructed.

Osaka Virtual Expo

Osaka is already a leader in adapting the technologies that arise. This year's Irl Expo takes place on Yumeshima, an artificial island in nearby Osaka Bay, while the virtual Expo lives online and as an app on desktop, mobile devices and meta -quest 2 or 3. Playable digital versions of the pavilions and sponsor rooms on Twelve Islands, including “Harmony -Island”, “In the Icelands”, “in the Iceland Islands, “,” Insland “,” Inslands “,” In the Icelands “,” In the Iceland, “,”, can “. Visitors are invited to discover a completely new version of themselves and acquire them, collect prey, use a selection of Emotes and to collect badge in a “guide” for visiting each pavilion.

The gameplay is mostly smooth. It is often possible to be frustrated by the card and feel slightly lost. This may be of good quality, as this is a familiar feeling when you take part in a large event. The Warp function works well between the islands, but on every island the experience of the room enables the content of the exhibition (videos, foils, static images) to remain organized spatially. The tools such as embedded videos and pictures or choreographed movements through three-dimensional information space offer designers and storytellers an improved online media to present ideas and visual stories. It resists the perfect, simple smoothness of a website or the relentless, flat interface of the social media feed.

A winding, translucent ring made of blue light surrounds the entire location and connects the islands. It is a digital, gamified version of the monumental Grand Ring of the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto with local Sugi Cedar and Hinoki Cypress in a 3D grid in which the Japanese temple draft relate. This hybrid physical and digital strategy corresponds to the goals of the national strategy “Society 5.0” Japan, a vision of a future that is enabled by Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, big data and biotechnology.

Evade

As in previous expos and trade fairs – the best known in New York in 1934, where GM showed “Futurama” – a dream of a city is the focus of cars and company pavilions. The Japanese telecommunications provider – The producer of the virtual expo – shoots several technical innovations, including Fonthech, a wearable with which users can share sensory perceptions over 6g signal. They also showed futuristic concepts such as telepathy for dogs to communicate with their owners. In the “Future City” pavilion, the Japanese mobility company Kawasaki had an impressive display, including hydrogen engines, concepts for train huts with robotkeepers and a powerful robot called COR-Leo. Live feeds of the Vertiport of the Expo were available to see virtual visitors to see large drones that landed and started at the Irl Osaka location.

Other corporate grabs were the underwater expedition of Japaner Energy Company Niterr, which, in addition to holding advertising with their latest R+D innovations, presented with comprehensive information on digital posters. Drinks Konglomerat Suntory had a fun game in which players get drinks from a machine, roast them and recycle the cans or bottles. Beermaker Asahi presented her forest, where wood is harvested sustainably.

The physical Osaka pavilion of the Japanese Ocean Neri is a number of domes designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. In practice, it is an underwater experience in which a turtle explains the challenges and successes of the ocean administration. The “Future of Life” pavilion showed futuristic visions of healthcare, education, mobility and various other aspects of future life developed by companies in cooperation with the artist TK.

There were also a few other abstract experiences, such as the zero 2 pavilion, a mysterious conceptual experience and the Japan pavilion, in which the Avatars of the players are transformed into a bunch of food waste (the goal of the mini-game is to turn on the biographical digitor to escape). I even recorded a selfie with a life -size Gundam that is on site in Osaka in addition to virtual life. Better Co-Ebeng is a number of pavilions in Osaka, one of which was designed by Pritzker Prize Laureate Sanaa. Online it is the abstract experience with a minimalist version of the essential structure of Sanaa that hovers in the “forest of calm”.

All of this is about the future. The future of how we live, how we connect and how we manage nature. Until 1970, previous trade fairs were decisive in the definition of what came next in architecture as well as in technology. But are expos today a futurism of the past? What is “the future” today? And what role do these expos play in construction and transmission? Are the Gee Whiz-Tech innovations still relevant like the electric light bulb or the elevator? Or is the Osaka Virtual Expo a “hammer looking for a nail” like the meta -verses? Personally, I think that there is a great value to expand the experience of this exhibition into the world, and hope that it will continue to expand in 2030 – including more national pavilions.