When I stepped through the threshold of the IPA* pavilion at CEATEC 2025, I entered not a flashy tech demo but a deceptively simple classroom set—a wooden desk, a globe, dim ambient lighting, walls that felt intimate and familiar. Yet within moments, that stillness began to shift. The walls breathed, shadows stretched, and through the VR goggles strapped to my face, I was pulled into a delicate but expansive vision: Star Island Schoolhouse, an immersive installation unveiled at Expo 2025 Osaka, now reinstalled at CEATEC.
At its core, Star Island Schoolhouse is a hybrid theatrical-VR installation where visitors wear a goggle-type device to explore a small classroom on a fictional island, undergoing a six-minute sensory journey that blends spatial transitions, music, and visual storytelling. That description is simple, but the experience resists being fully reduced to it.
The classroom becomes a portal to the sea, sky, space, systems, and identity, unlocking IPA’s vision of our future Society 5.0, where people will “Live Anywhere” and will enjoy diverse experiences no matter where they are.
*IPA stands for Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan
Imagining Society 5.0 and the Future of Learning
Beneath its cinematic surface, the installation is an argument—expressed poetically—about the future of society, education, and mobility in a digitally augmented world. IPA articulates that this work embodies their mission of creating a society in which anyone can “learn, play, work, and live wherever they choose,” deeply rooted in local communities yet networked globally.
The installation is anchored around the idea of digital lifelines: infrastructure, AI, spatial identity, connectivity, translation, sustainable energy, wellness, and systemic interdependence. The thematic nodes such as AI / Agent (having another you), Spatial ID (flying through 4D space), AI / Translation, Energy, Healthcare, Trash / Waste, Security, Talent, and Entertainment. These are not mere buzzwords but leitmotifs through which visitors are meant to sense, intuit, and reflect.
In other words, Star Island Schoolhouse is less about showing future gadgets than about evoking a sensibility: what it might feel like when your identity, place, and capacity to learn float freely in a digital-physical continuum. It does not prescribe solutions, but opens a poetic frame for questioning: what if language barriers dissolve, waste becomes cyclical, energy becomes ambient intelligence, and you can carry your learning space with you?
Eliane prepares to enter the Star Island Schoolhouse, equipped with a VR headset and listening to the introductory instructions at the IPA booth.
Star Island Schoolhouse Experience, Step by Step
Here is a reconstructed narrative flow combining what I felt during the CEATEC run with publicly documented accounts (especially from the Expo version), acknowledging some speculative interpolation:
Entry into the classroom set
I wore the goggles and entered a modest physical classroom space. The furnishings—desks, chairs, a globe, perhaps a water container—felt solid and tactile, anchoring me in a familiar environment before anything extraordinary occurred.
Welcoming & narrative cue
In that classroom, Ms. Ai Hashimoto appears (in the narrative) as the homeroom teacher, greeting visitors and inviting them to the unfolding lesson. This situates the visitor in a pedagogical frame: you are both student and witness. (This is affirmed in IPA’s official description: “In the classroom … Ms. Ai Hashimoto starts off by welcoming the visitors.”)
Floating dots, touchpoints & transitions
Within the classroom, faint points of light—floating dots—hover in the air, acting as interaction loci. Touching or gazing at them triggers transitions, walls may dissolve, spatial geometry may shift, and portals may open.
Touching the dots displayed in the virtual room opens floating windows that allow visitors to learn about the technologies and trends (Society 5.0). Additionally, this virtual knowledge base provides information about the various government initiatives, such as the AISI (Japan AI Safety Institute), the Ouranos Ecosystem, Japan Cyber-Star, Manabi DX learning space for digital development, MITOU program for talent discovery.
Beyond the walls: shore, water, sky
Slowly, the room gives way to exterior space. I felt myself walking toward a shoreline, stepping on surfaces that felt wet —an intentional effect to blur the line between illusion and reality. In those moments, the sky opens, drones or rockets may appear, aerial vistas expand, and you sense cosmic or atmospheric extension.
Spectacle, layering & systemic glimpses
As the transition completes, visual motifs of energy flows, translation overlays, organic data visualizations, perhaps transparent architectural forms, or branching connective networks emerge. Fireworks, drones, or rockets punctuate transitions—spectacle cues that suggest optimism and motion.
Return & reflexive capture
At the experience’s close, the classroom returns. The physical set remains, now perhaps subtly altered (e.g., water traces).
At the end, I received a QR code that linked to a short 3D video of myself inside the schoolhouse—my silhouette, posture, motion composited into the virtual space. This reflexive loop collapsed the boundary between viewer and participant, making me a part of the narrative.
The Link to IPA’s Mission & Innovation Strategy
This installation is not a standalone art piece—it is a strategic embodiment of IPA’s mission: to promote creators and catalyze innovation toward a future society. IPA is deploying Star Island Schoolhouse not simply as spectacle, but as a public prototype—a sensorial argument for Society 5.0. By staging it in high-visibility venues (Expo, CEATEC), IPA bridges the gap between policy, technology, public imagination, and design.
The installation invites visitors—engineers, students, policymakers, casual passersby—to feel possible futures, to internalize questions about place, mobility, agency, and digital augmentation. Through this, IPA is seeding cultural literacy about emerging infrastructure and offering support to creative practitioners to explore speculative futures, rather than merely subsidizing tech adoption.
Creators & Credits
The installation is officially credited with:
Ai Hashimoto as cast (serving as the guiding “teacher” presence)
Kazuaki Seki as director
Hikaru Arata (WONK) for music
Special Appearance by: ID, Eevee, Dodo.
These roles suggest a cross-disciplinary collaboration—performers, directors, spatial and visual designers—working in concert to weave narrative, spatial logic, and immersive experience.
To visit the Star Island Schoolhouse installation at CEATEC 2025, head to the IPA booth inside the LIFE 2050 pavilion at Makuhari Messe (October 14–17). The immersive session (wearing a goggle-type device) requires advance reservation: pick up a numbered ticket at the IPA booth’s reservation counter (distribution begins daily at 10:00 AM). Tickets are issued on a first-come, first-served basis and are limited; each person can receive only one.
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