The Osaka Virtual Expo 2025 Is A Fully Playable Video Game

I love world’s fairs and expos. I’ve always wanted to visit one and this year I finally got the chance—at least virtually. The Osaka World Expo, a mega exhibition titled “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” will host an expected 28 million visitors over 184 days from April 13th to October 13th. But the online Osaka Virtual Expo could attract over 250 million, allowing people who cannot travel to Japan an opportunity to experience the expo, nearly quadrupling the in-person attendance record set by Shanghai Expo in 2010.

The massive public events have defined and redefined our modern world. The 2025 Osaka Expo marks 174 years since the legendary 1851 London exhibition where modern architecture was born in the form of the glass and iron “Crystal Palace”, and 55 years since Osaka Expo 1970, where wireless telephones, electric cars, and moving sidewalks were first displayed to the public. It remains one of the most spectacular displays of art, architecture, and technology in the 20th century.

In 2020, the Dubai expo was forced online due to COVID-19, and the digital version attracted around 250 million from around the world. The 4.38 square-kilometer physical site in Dubai was recreated and beamed into visitors’ living rooms with Google Maps’ Street View and 360-degree imagery after the event was postponed by the pandemic. But the Osaka Expo is the first completely virtual expo, with a full, dedicated video game app.

These types of online environments were novel before the 2020 lockdowns, when they suddenly proliferated and became instantly insufferable as every exhibition had an in-browser version. Facebook jumped on the bandwagon and renamed itself Meta. It became clear very quickly that the metaverse was not somewhere people wanted to spend significant time shopping or hanging out. However, when done right, these online environments excel at recreating exhibitions and extending their reach. Now, visitors need not travel to Osaka to experience at least part of the expo. And it can live forever online, long after the physical pavilions are decommissioned and deconstructed.

Osaka Virtual Expo

Osaka is already a leader in adapting emerging technologies. This year’s IRL expo will take place on Yumeshima, an artificial island in nearby Osaka Bay, while the Virtual Expo lives online and can be downloaded as an app on desktop, mobile devices and Meta Quest 2 or 3. Playable, digital versions of the pavilions and sponsor rooms are arranged on twelve islands, including “Harmony Island”, “Progress Island”, and “Encounter Island”. Visitors are invited to “discover a whole new version” of themselves, and can acquire skins, collect loot, use a selection of emotes, and collect badges in a “guide” for visiting each pavilion.

The gameplay is smooth for the most part. Often it is possible to get frustrated by the map and feel slightly lost. This is perhaps a good quality, as that is a familiar feeling when attending a large event. The warp function works well between islands, but within each island, the experience of the space allows the exhibition’s content (videos, slides, static images), to remain organized spatially. The tools, such as embedded video and imagery, or choreographed movement through three-dimensional information space, give designers and storytellers an enhanced online media in which to present ideas and visual narratives. It resists the perfect, simple smoothness of a website, or the relentless, flat interface of the social media feed.

A sinuous, translucent ring of blue light encircles the entire site, connecting the islands. It is a digital, gamified version of Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto’s monumental Grand Ring with local sugi cedar and hinoki cypress in a 3d grid that references Japanese temple designs. This hybrid physical and digital strategy aligns with the goals of Japan’s national strategy “Society 5.0”, a vision of a future empowered by Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, big data, and biotechnology.

Getting Around Osaka Virtual Expo

Like past expos and fairs—most famously New York 1934, where GM showed “Futurama”—a dream of a city built around cars and corporate pavilions takes center stage. Japanese telecom provider NTT—the producer of the virtual expo—shows several tech innovations including FeelTech, a wearable that allows users to share sensory perceptions via 6G signal. They also showed off futuristic concepts such as telepathy for dogs to communicate with their owners. At the “Future City” pavilion, Japanese mobility company Kawasaki had an impressive display including hydrogen engines, concepts for train cabins with robot waiters, and a ridable horse robot called Cor-leo. Live feeds of the Expo’s Vertiport were available for virtual visitors to see large drones landing and taking off at the IRL Osaka site.

Other corporate standouts were Japanese energy company Niterra’s underwater expedition that had educational mini-games alongside promotional content showcasing their latest R+D innovations, often with extensive information on digital placards. Drinks conglomerate Suntory had a fun game where players can get drinks from a vending machine, toast them, and recycle the cans or bottles. Beermaker Asahi showcased their forest, where lumber is harvested sustainably.

The Japanese ocean non-profit NERI’s physical Osaka pavilion is a set of domes designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Virtually, it is an underwater experience where a turtle explains the challenges and successes of ocean stewardship. The “Future of Life” pavilion displayed futuristic visions of healthcare, education, mobility, and various other aspects of future living, developed by companies in collaboration with artist TK.

There were also several more abstract experiences, such as the null^2 pavilion, a mysterious conceptual experience, and the Japan pavilion, where players’ avatars are morphed into a pile of food waste (the objective of the mini-game is to turn on the bio-digestor in order to escape). I even took a selfie with a life-size Gundam, which is on-site at Osaka in addition to living virtually. Better Co-Being is a series of pavilions in Osaka, one of which is designed by Pritzker Prize laureate SANAA. Online, it is the most abstract experience, with a minimalist version of SANAA’s ethereal gridded structure that floats amongst the “Forest of Tranquility”.

All of this is about the future. The future of how we live, how we connect, and how we steward nature. Past fairs, up until 1970, were instrumental in defining what was next, both in architecture as well as technology. But are expos today a futurism of the past? What is “the future” today? And what role do these expos play in constructing it and broadcasting it? Are the gee-whiz tech innovations still relevant like the electric light bulb or the elevator were? Or is the Osaka Virtual Expo a “hammer in search of a nail”, like the metaverse itself? Personally, I think there is great value in extending the experience of this exhibition to the world, and hope it continues to expand in 2030— including more national pavilions.