Digital Signage Awards 2020

 ■ Digital Signage Awards 2020

Digital Signage Awards 2020, winning works.

1 Grand Prix and 10 Excellence Awards.

I served as chair of the jury.

This time it was announced on the website.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/2020winner/?fbclid=IwAR14ZavGzJfuUE5nXyHeHlvJikFHZxcLi_6V20zfgKCDXOG8Mpf9n-jMYiU

Two trends were pointed out by the jury.

Upsizing and technical implementation.

Effective "up-scaling" of the display. Thanks to capital investment for the Olympics and Paralympics and the lower cost of LEDs, seamless, high-definition screens of any size are appearing one after another.

And the latest technologies such as AI and dynamic DOOH are implemented to visualize new media value.

Grand Prix

"Umeda Metro Vision"

Osaka Metro

4m x 40m-sized (Guinness World Record certified) LEDs are installed on the platform.

New possibilities for creativity, entertainment, live viewing, and transmission of video information for inbound tourists are expected.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-umed301/

Excellence Award (DOOH category)

“2020 New Year Campaign”

Twitter Japan

Real-time integration of the Internet and signage is realized. This is a case where signage has become a destination for SNS and also a starting point, creating a cycle.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-twit401/

Excellence Award (DOOH Category)

"Dynamic DOOH Development on the Train"

Sapporo Beer

Oricom

BizRite Technology

Saitama Rapid Railway

AI camera analyzes passenger attributes and realizes real-time content sorting. This is an example of interlocking sensing and DOOH.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-sapp402/

Excellence Award (UX/Interactive Category)

"Rugby World Cup Digital Press Photo Exhibition"

Yomiuri Shimbun Tokyo Head Office

NTT DOCOMO

Canon

Dentsu Group

By using 5G to show it in real time, they have created a vivid new style of news reporting. Anticipating the future of dynamic DOOH.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-yomi403/

Excellence Award (Retail Category)

"Three Cs Avoidance AI Vision"

BiZright Technology

Shishikura 

By making good use of the latest AI technology, they were among the first to put into practical use the new value of digital signage, which is one solution to the challenges of the Coronavirus crisis.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-sanm404/

Excellence Award (Transportation Category)

"Shinjuku Station Digital Wall"

Odakyu Agency

Odakyu Electric Railway

They drove the expansion of the media of the base location. In addition, it sets a precedent of installing a camera that can acquire actual data, and future data utilization can be expected.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-shin405/

Excellence Award (Transportation Category)

"Dynamic Vehicle Screen"

BizRite Technology

Saitama Rapid Railway

Equipped with cameras, sensors, and lines, it realizes dynamic content distribution based on real-time data inside and outside the train. Enables impression-based sales.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-dyna406/

Excellence Award (Transportation Category)

"Den-en-toshi Line Shibuya Station Big Signage Premium"

Tokyu

Tokyu Agency

A work that has become a benchmark for the entire industry as a large LED for public spaces. It can be installed in a position where passersby can touch it, has a high level of creativity, and is highly rated for both attention and immersion.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-bigs407/

Excellence Award (Outdoor Large Screen Category)

"Q Plaza Ikebukuro/Grand Cinema Sunshine"

Sasaki Kogyo

WOW

PROTERAS

The LED wrapped on the ceiling was made visible from the outside. It can be expected to contribute to the expansion of the signage market as a customer attraction device for amusement facilities.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-qpla408/

Excellence Award (Outdoor Large Screen Category)

"Shibuya Scramble Square Vision"

Tokyu

East Japan Railway Company

Tokyo Metro

Shibuya Scramble Square

Area management in front of Shibuya station

JR East Planning

Tokyu Agency

Non-standard size and original shape. Efforts integrated with urban development.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-scra409/

Excellence Award (Outdoor Large Screen Category)

"Hisamitsu Pharmaceutical LED signboard in front of Shibuya scramble crossing"

Large space

Hisamitsu Pharmaceutical

Hakuhodo DY Outdoor

Taisei Neon

A new attempt to use still images in the daytime and a blue light-up targeted at medical workers to express social good.

https://digital-signage.jp/openevent/award/dsa2020-hisa410/

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Superhuman Sports Grand Challenge.

 ■Superhuman Sports Grand Challenge.

We held a symposium on the Superhuman Sports Grand Challenge.

This is an attempt to surpass human physical abilities using "superhumanization technology" that integrates machines with the human body.

We aim to help people through technology, expand human potential, and contribute to the creation of a future society that goes beyond physical limitations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It5ircKUQnY

This time around, I introduce new challenges in three domains: the "Super SPRINT Challenge: Expansion of Our Physical Ability to Run," "Super PHYSICAL Challenge: Expansion of Physical Strength and Dexterity," and "Super SENSE Challenge: Expanding Our Ability to Recognize Space."

MORNING in the Future (30-second commercial)

https://youtu.be/VLCCGE9Vp8k

Super SPRINT Challenge

This challenge is about expanding our physical ability to run.

The goal is to break the world record in a time-based challenge for a specified distance.

The expectation is that it would lead to developments in mobility tools usable in real-world society.

This features Masaki Mochimaru and Akihiko Murai of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Takayuki Tanaka of Hokkaido University.

https://youtu.be/tld54wMuSAA

Super PHYSICAL Challenge

This is a well-balanced challenge about people's strength, agility, dexterity, and endurance.

It is hoped that it will be applied to the design of wearable support devices used in situations where minute control is required, such as rehabilitation, nursing, and factory work.

This features Yuichi Kurita of Hiroshima University and Takayuki Tanaka of Hokkaido University.

https://youtu.be/SOcIg9Lh7vU

Super SENSE Challenge

This is a challenge geared at expanding the sensibilities we use to recognize space.

It is hoped that it will lead to the development of systems that support the elderly and visually impaired, and information presentation methods that do not rely on sight, such as ways of moving in dark environments with the support of devices.

This features Kouta Minamizawa of Keio University.

https://youtu.be/w5CgsymJ4r4

Even if one has a chance to compete in the Olympics, they may have no chance at the Paralympic Games.

Superhuman Sports emerged after it was decided that the Olympics would be held in Tokyo, with the idea of letting people participate in the Olympics/Paralympics and breaking down barriers.

https://superhuman-sports.org/

At the time, there was a debate about the possibility of people emerging who would amputate their limbs, wear apparatus, and participate in the Paralympics.

That seems like it could come into being.

But it's still an unproductive discussion.

So that being the case, it'd be better to develop and host an international competition such that everyone can take part, such as with super sports.

"Would you amputate your legs to enter the Paralympics?"

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/sports/story/6215/index.html

There is much more in store for superhuman sports.

Stay tuned!

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On the occasion of my 60th birthday. Two points of astonishment.

 ■ On the occasion of my 60th birthday. Two points of astonishment.

I am simply shocked. My 60th birthday is here.

I was immature all this time, and considered myself to be a rookie, yet here I am, suddenly a senior, an old man, and somehow missed the middle part.

At the same time, I was confronted with an incident that made me question just how such a thing could happen in my life.

Here came these two surprises. Just what happened?

It's a super personal introspection. I'm writing this down as a note to myself.

They say that we will soon live to 100 as commonplace, and will go through three major phases in a lifetime.

If we assume it was two phases thus far, the major turning point between the first and second half was marriage and children around my 30s.

The first half was a growth period, while the latter half was living with my family.

The children have grown into adulthood and found their own careers, and both got married this past year.

If we shift into a three-phase cycle, who should play the leading role in that?

If we shift this thinking from "who" to "what," then it'd be safe to say I have four discrete stages at 20-year intervals.

1) First phase in the 60s-70s; 2) Second phase in the 80s-90s; 3) Third phase in the 00s-10s; 4) Fourth phase in the 2020s.

1) The first was goofing off; 2) The second was with the government; 3) The third was doing projects as a pseudo-academic.

4) What should the fourth phase be, then?

1) I built up Shonen Knife towards the end of phase 1.

2) I was at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in phase 2.

3) With phase 3, we created iU and CiP.

That's the extent of my output.

4) So what to do in phase 4?

1) As someone who had been TV-loving kid, I set managing the rules of the information society as the locus for my workplace.

2) I worked as a government official tackling the advanced information society of new media.

3) I was an academic for the burgeoning age of digital, IT-driven society.

4) At the forefront of AI, I founded iU and CiP out of the idea of a "super-leisure society."

I was never exposed to war.

I felt a sense of inferiority compared to those that had.

However, I had to confront COVID-19, a "war" in its own right.

We are still in the midst of the battle, but I'd like to see what the future after that brings.

Over the course of this war, I have seen how Japan truly fell down in digital during the second and third phases.

Despite the fact that we had been at war in the digital space for thirty years, we lacked a wartime awareness.

Our generation questioned the one before it to take responsibility for the previous world war, and we are now the generation that has lived through the "Digital Thirty Years' War," and are in turn being asked to take responsibility for that defeat.

While I'm taking my own actions towards those who came before and using the "shut up, old man" card, I have to think about how to take responsibility for my own part in this.

I aim to grow iU and CiP as sites for digital into something mature and ready.

So what should I set my sights on next?

I'd better think about it before my 60th birthday.

Is what I was I thinking, but once COVID-19 hit, the environment and prospects have been more like a roulette wheel.

It seems we'll have DX and my vision of a super-leisure society much sooner than I expected.

I'm simply stunned.

I needed to set about making sense of this shock.

Yet as I did, something even more shocking occurred.

2) It was quite turbulent times at the government office where I spent my second phase.

The two head people reported about on a daily basis had been sworn friends from the same period, and I was intimate with all of the junior staff below them.

Who would have thought they would shock the world in that way?

I really suffered, feeling it personally.

My second phase as a government official corresponds to when the scope of media policy increased.

Until then, the only companies that had relationships with government offices were the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation and a monopoly called KDD, and NHK, so only commercial broadcasting technology and accounting capacities.

It was a very small administration within an even narrower field.

Liberalization, deregulation, and digitalization were in that sense movements to increase the scope of the administration itself.

How do we increase the number of new IT entrants? How to give business opportunities to content companies other than broadcasters?

My job was doing sales to increase our clientele.

I went to and fro.

In terms of creating a culture where the public and private sectors could connect, I am not entirely detached from the current issue, and I have my part in the responsibility.

My senior colleagues did their best.

They tried too hard, got into a conflict with NTT, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and the Ministry of Finance, and were dismantled under the Hashimoto program.

Feeling responsible, I stepped down, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications was established.

My peers and junior colleagues worked hard, too.

The reputation has improved, and good infrastructure has been created. 　

But perhaps we tried too hard.

Those efforts went outside of the established rules and were subject to opprobrium.

And that criticism went beyond the administration and methods itself, but that the organizations and people within them were themselves to blame.

It's painful to hear.

As a consequence of 2) above, the government office was dismantled and reorganized. Alongside rebuke for our failure at digitization, it's subject to censure yet again, which is shocking.

All I can do is be shocked. I keep thinking about it instinctively.

That's where I am on the occasion of my 60th birthday.

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CiP joins Tokyo Smart City.

 ■CiP joins Tokyo Smart City.

Broadcasting content out of the Tokyo Smart City Forum @ TOKYO PORTCITY TAKESHIBA.

I took the stage with Mr. Okada, president of Tokyu Land Corporation; Mr. Takumi, general manager at SoftBank;  Mr. Yonezu, a manager for Tokyo Prefecture; and professor Ishido of Keio University, et al.

I am reporting here on a presentation we made about the CiP pop & tech special zone.

CiP stands for Contents Innovation Program. The idea is to build up a content-driven zone over eight years.

Tokyo is the center of global pop culture, but there is no central place to disseminate it. The industry is disparate.

I was aware of the problem, too.

The government has also been discussing the issue from the vantage point of Cool Japan and IP and IT policies.

I thought we should do it.

Let's build it in Tokyo.

It's the best place in the world, both economically and culturally.

Richard Florida espoused the theory of the creative city. In terms of economic scale, the wider Tokyo area is the global top.

It ranked number one in the world in an Adobe survey of the most creative cities.

It has by far more Michelin restaurants than Paris.

It ranked number one in the world in Global Finance Magazine's survey of livable cities.

Tokyo Tower is nearby.

Though it was often destroyed by the characters below, it's still standing.

Mothra in 1961. King Ghidorah in '64. Garamon in '66.

Godzilla, for his part, restrained himself from destroying it until 2003. And yet, he, too, destroyed it.

Even though it may be destroyed, they keep right on building it. They destroyed it and rebuild it again. There's something wild about this.

We'll keep destroying and rebuilding.

Takeshiba, too, was destroyed and rebuilt.

Tokyo has an ocean nearby, after all. It's a capital with an ocean.

Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Ottawa, Beijing, and Moscow.

No permanent member of the G7 countries has an ocean by the capital.

Japan has made the ocean its capital, but it doesn't make good use of it.

So let's use the ocean.

That was one of the appeals of Takeshiba.

 

What is important at the same time is fusion with technology.

A big wave of AI and IoT is coming. A big wave of content is also coming.

This should be a national strategic special zone that combines pop and tech. The basic concept is to create a city that develops new content with technology, rather than using content that already exists.

A special zone for pop and tech.

That's the CiP pop & tech zone.

To simplify, the idea was to make a city like Hatsune Miku.

Hatsune Miku is a fusion of technology called vocaloid software and a pop character called Miku-chan, and has developed out of lots of people joining the Internet community to help her compose songs, perform, and dance.

That sort of city.

To start things off, we created 10 tenets for the CiP vision.

- Fusion of the Japanese version of Silicon Valley and Hollywood

- A base where cosplayers congregate and robots fly around

- Permanent organization for the creation of new industries

- International universities and kindergartens of the future

- Cohabitation between creators and entrepreneurs

- Dejima for the 21st century

- Industry-academia-government platform

And so on.

CiP has four core functionalities. 　

We have a cycle of research and development, human resource development, entrepreneurship support, business matching, and research on emerging themes. 　

A place where everything from research to business is carried out under one roof.

Universities and research institutes such as Keio University, the University of Tokyo, and RIKEN joined 50 industry groups and companies in the telecommunications, broadcasting, IT, entertainment, advertising, and other fields to promote town development.

A number of projects have been underway since before the opening of the city.

In terms of pop, the Artist Commons maintains a database of artists in fields like music.

Superhuman sports is about creating a new form of sports where everyone can become superhuman by integrating humans and machines.

The World Otaku Institute is the "head temple" for otaku researchers.

The tech team has been proceeding with a plan to fully implement advanced technology in Takeshiba.

There are eight axes: robots, drones, mobility, signage, public viewing, digital art, wireless power transfer, and data distribution.

Several hundreds of robots go about their work. Drone taxis fly about on the 5G grid. The world's first IoT broadcast that combines communication and broadcasting.

Robots, signage, data distribution, and the like have already been implemented and are underway as of the city opening.

We are seeing potential around drones and wireless power transfer.

There are no other examples in the world of smart buildings that are integrated to this degree.

We are also collaborating with SoftBank to deploy 5G, AI, and IoT solutions.

I want to laterally roll out this model throughout Japan and overseas.

A base for industry-academia collaboration will be set up on the 8th floor of this building.

In addition to Keio KMD using it as a satellite campus, iU, which I opened in April as president, will also have a satellite location here.

The NPO CANVAS, which has been doing activities to enhance children's creativity in the digital age, will also occupy the space.

The "Super Education Association," which promotes educational reform, is also based out of CiP. That project is already underway.

"Super E-Sports School" is a community of schools and researchers who are passionate about e-sports.

This is a "super entrepreneurship school" that matches schools that are keen on entrepreneurship with entrepreneurs and VCs.

We have also established a CiP fund and have already invested in four content companies.

A silent rock streaming event with no audience was held in this hall at the opening in September. Aerial drone footage was also taken. I believe this suggested a possible route for a post-COVID model.

Digital Minister Takuya Hirai, who took an eager interest, said he would like to make this a branch of the Digital Agency.

Designs are underway to facilitate collaboration.

I'd like to roll this out laterally.

We hope to proceed with the creation of a "pop tech archipelago" that connects all the sites being conceived in various places.

In Nagoya, the "Station Ai" concept, a huge entrepreneurship support facility led by Aichi Prefectural Governor Omura, is getting into gear. CiP is responsible for building that community.

We are also promoting partnerships with overseas cities such as Seoul, Barcelona, and Shanghai.

As a showcase, pop and tech events will be held to coincide with next year's Olympics.

We hope to make this a global event that exceeds overseas pop and tech events.

Its name is Change Tomorrow, or Chomorrow for short.

The fourth industrial revolution. Society 5.0.

Artificial intelligence and robots are taking away our jobs. But let's leave the work to them.

The "super-leisure society" is coming.

Japan's Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei periods serve as signposts in the development and denouement of Japan's early modern to modern era, while the Reiwa era represents us opening the curtain on a new epoch of civilization that the human race has not entered before.

That's what CiP is here for.

Yet things changed under COVID-19.

What shall we do post-COVID?

New approaches to centralization and diffusion. New combinations of real + virtual. A new sense of density. That's what we have to design.

And we have to create this new normal to be more attractive than it was before COVID-19.

This is another piece of "homework" CiP is tasked with.

The plague of the 14th century. The authority of the church declined, and it was the Renaissance that came in its wake. Art and science.

What is COVID-19 leading us to rebuild?

The building up of pop & tech special zones,

The design of a super-leisure society around AI and robots,

The creation of the new normal post-COVID,

And a new Renaissance.

Those are the key themes CiP must grapple with.

Hope you'll follow us and stay tuned.

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