COVID-19 is a pandemic that has spread all over the world. Many people lose their lives to the virus every day both in Japan and overseas.

Under these circumstances, to strive toward DOCOMO’s corporate philosophy of “creating a new world of communications culture,” we looked into establishing a project with the goal of “providing communication during the COVID-19 pandemic” while maintaining social distance protocols.

The spherical drone display, which was at the heart of the project, was being used less and less at events due to the impact of COVID-19.

Thus, we examined how to also use this display during the COVID-19 pandemic when carrying out the BEYOND DISTANCE project.

The scale of the project was about 20 million yen.

The event was held at the DESIGNART “Space O” venue in Omotesando Hills, where the total number of visitors was expected to be about 2,500.

Two “spherical drone display” units, which is the world's first drone product to fly while displaying images 360 degrees, would be used to display the faces of participants in real-time.

Those who access the special website via PC or smartphone could send each other virtual stickers on the drone display ‘beyond the distance’.

The experience would be shared on YouTube Live so the audience could experience this futuristic form of communication.

On the special website, we prepared a total of 23 types of virtual stickers/effect stickers for each of the two themes.

The time limit for the experience would be set to 2 minutes so that many people could experience communicating via sending stickers.

For participation in the venue, we tried to differentiate it from the website experience and made it interactive where stickers were projected on the venue’s dome screen when a specific pose was taken.

Due to the impact of COVID-19, it is difficult for people to experience the same things in the same place.

We currently live in a world where it is difficult to gather in one place and communicate.

We predicted that under these circumstances many people would feel a sense of being cut-off from others, and made it our goal to resolve this.

We predicted that there would be many visitors who could not come to the venue due to the COVID-19 restrictions and created a special website for them to participate.

Everyone could participate in BEYOND DISTANCE in real-time from the special website.

The event was held at the DESIGNART TOKYO 2020 venue, “Space O,” for 8 days from October 27 to November 3, 2020, from 11:00 to 20:00.

As a touch point for users, we prepared a special website that could be accessed remotely in real-time by those who could not come to the Space O venue in person.

While we did not make a big announcement, about 600 people visited the website from posts on social media and more than 20% participated.

Participants experienced artistic communication with virtual stickers for two minutes and so many people were connected ‘beyond the distance’.

By using an eye-catching spherical display and a six-meter dome screen to cover it at a venue where other works are exhibited, over half of the visitors to the entire venue were interested in what we were exhibiting and about 30% of said visitors ended up taking part.

The BEYOND DISTANCE project enabled participation from the special website and venue.

While we did not make a big announcement, about 2,000 people, which exceeded our initial expectations, interacted with our posts on social media, and 550 of them were connected ‘beyond the distance’.

On social media, there were posts such as, “It got me excited for the future.” and “It was fun and a great way to communicate while keeping social distance!”

We succeeded in “creating a new world of communications culture” during the COVID-19 pandemic.