Tokyo Michiterasu 2020 by Nomura Co., Ltd.
A COVID-era Illumination event combining a live and virtual space.
Participants sent out message of appreciation and encouragement each other.
Tokyo Michiterasu (Lighting the way to the future) is an illumination event held in Marunouchi, the city of history, tradition and culture around Tokyo Station. Since 1999, jointly hosted by the East Japan Railway Company and Mitsubishi Estate, it has been attracting over 600,000 tourists every year.
In 2020, under the influence of a pandemic, with safety as the top priority, we designed and executed "Tokyo Michiterasu 2020," a 2-week immersive experiential event, disseminating light of hope to people regardless of their location using physical and digital space, deploying Web-Based Augmented Reality. This highly artistic illumination event aims to send message of appreciation and encouragement, from the heart of Tokyo, to all the people who are under anxiety and challenging environment, including medical professionals and essential workers.
We built an outdoor art gallery where people can enjoy art while taking a safe, leisurely walk. For prevention of crowds, the exhibition term was extended as twice as usual year.
Visitors can create photo messages with Tokyo's beautiful cityscape and send them to friends, family, and loved ones in remote places.
On the website, two types of illumination experiences were delivered. One is the illustration of stories in which the animals made up of art calligraphy wander in city of Tokyo to find light of hope and diffuse it into the city.
The other is Web AR experience in which viewers can activate animals etched with the art calligraphy of appreciation and encouragement messages and send to others, the message is merged.
