# Interactive Installations at World Expos: What Pavilions Used at Expo 2025 Osaka and How to Plan for Six Months of Crowds

> A World Expo runs for up to six months and draws crowds no brand event sees: Expo 2025 Osaka counted 29,017,924 visitors in 184 days. Pavilions there used RFID tokens, camera and AI personalisation, touch-to-sound wires and haptics. Interactives at an Expo are judged by capacity per hour and six months of uptime, not by a single wow moment.

**Published:** 2026-11-04 - **By:** MLABART

## What makes an interactive installation at a World Expo different?

Scale and duration. A World Expo is open for up to six months, and the crowds are on a different order from a launch or a pop-up: Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai counted 29,017,924 visitors between 13 April and 13 October 2025, including about 3.4 million accreditation-pass entries; paid attendance was 25,578,986. Expo 2020 Dubai recorded 24,102,967 visits over 182 days, and Expo 2010 Shanghai about 73 million in 184 days, with a single-day record of more than 1.03 million on 16 October 2010.

That changes what "good" means. An interactive that delights one person at a time for two minutes can be the bottleneck that creates a two-hour queue. At an Expo, an installation is judged by how many people it can serve per hour, whether it works for a visitor who speaks none of the pavilion's languages, and whether it is still working in month six.

| Expo | Dates | Reported attendance | Average per day |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Expo 2010 Shanghai | 1 May - 31 Oct 2010 (184 days) | 73,085,000 visitors | ~= 397,000 |
| Expo 2020 Dubai | 1 Oct 2021 - 31 Mar 2022 (182 days) | 24,102,967 visits | ~= 132,000 |
| Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai | 13 Apr - 13 Oct 2025 (184 days) | 29,017,924 visitors (incl. accreditation passes) | ~= 158,000 |

- [Expo 2025 -- Wikipedia (total 29,017,924; paid attendance 25,578,986; 13 April - 13 October 2025)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2025)
- [Dubai Media Office -- Expo 2020 Dubai records 24,102,967 visits (2 April 2022)](https://mediaoffice.ae/en/news/2022/april/02-04/dubai-delivers-on-promise-recording-over-24-million-visits-at-expo-2020-dubai)
- [Expo 2010 -- Wikipedia (73,085,000 visitors; single-day record 16 October 2010)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2010)

- ![Bar chart of average visitors per day at three World Expos, calculated as the published total divided by days open: Expo 2010 Shanghai about 397,000 a day (73,085,000 over 184 days); Expo 2025 Osaka about 158,000 a day (29,017,924 including accreditation passes over 184 days); Expo 2020 Dubai about 132,000 a day (24,102,967 visits over 182 days). Peaks were far higher: Shanghai recorded over 1.03 million on 16 October 2010.](https://mlabart.com/insights/world-expo-pavilion-interactive-installations/expo-visitors-per-day.svg)

## What interactive installations did pavilions use at Expo 2025 Osaka?

Four pavilions where the maker published how the interaction works. These are other studios' and companies' work, described from their own pages; MLABART was not involved in any of them.

| Pavilion | Made by | What visitors do | Technology, as the maker describes it |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Panasonic Group Pavilion "The Land of NOMO" | Panasonic | Children carry an RFID "crystal device" through the zones and hand it back at the end; a tree reads their face and creates a personal butterfly that reappears in the finale theatre when they wave a fan over one of 32 floor points | RFID crystal devices with six cameras tracking reactions; facial-expression analysis at 17 trees fitted with transparent OLED displays; a 7 x 3.5 m mist wall with six projectors; a 360° finale theatre with 32 access points and 3D audio tracking all 32 butterflies with under 100 ms latency |
| NTT Pavilion | Rhizomatiks (exhibition experience design and implementation) | Touch hanging wires and hear them; be filmed and see the result on the walls | 20 vertical wires fitted with vibration sensors, with the vibrations turned into sound; in Zone 3, camera footage of visitors analysed with AI and reflected in wall projection and ambient music |
| Ricoh "Jellyfish Pavilion" | Ricoh | Play with a large touch display and hold up cards that change music and visual effects | An 86-inch 4K multi-touch Interactive Whiteboard; cards using acoustic AR to change background music and instruments, and cards that add visual effects to faces and bodies (as announced before opening) |
| Italy Pavilion -- Haptic Totem | Weart | Feel textures, vibrations and forces while watching and listening | A haptic device synchronising tactile feedback with visual and audio content |

- [Panasonic Connect -- case study: Panasonic Pavilion "The Land of NOMO" (PDF)](https://docs.connect.panasonic.com/projector/casestudies/entertainment012/pdf/Report_4P_expo2025_NOMO.pdf)
- [Rhizomatiks -- EXPO2025 NTT Pavilion](https://rhizomatiks.com/en/work/expo2025-ntt-pavilion)
- [Ricoh -- technologies for the Expo 2025 pavilion (28 March 2025)](https://ricoh.com/about/advertisement/expo2025-kurage)
- [Weart -- our Haptic Totem at Expo 2025 Osaka](https://weart.it/blog/touching-the-future-our-haptic-totem-at-expo-2025-osaka/)

## What do the Expo pavilion interactives have in common?

Read together, the four pavilions show five patterns that apply to any high-traffic exhibition. They are our reading of the makers' descriptions, not claims the makers made:

- A thread through the visit. Panasonic's crystal device, carried from zone to zone and handed back at the end, links separate zones into one personal story, so the finale can show each child something they made earlier.
- Many touch points instead of one station. 32 floor access points and 20 sensor wires let dozens of people interact at once, which is what keeps a queue moving.
- Personalisation that lands on a shared surface. Camera and AI analysis is used to change what everyone sees -- a butterfly, a wall projection, the music -- rather than to run a one-to-one screen.
- More than a screen. Vibration, haptics, mist and sound give the interaction a physical feel and work for visitors who cannot read the pavilion's languages.
- Reliability built in before opening. Panasonic set up full-scale demo rooms in Tokyo and Osaka and ran daily simulations and stress tests beyond the demand expected at the venue.

## How do you plan an interactive installation for six months of Expo crowds?

Start with capacity, not content. A simple calculation tells you whether an interactive can live inside a pavilion's flow or will create a queue outside it:

- Capacity: people per hour = number of stations x 3,600 / seconds per turn. Compare it with the number of people the pavilion admits per hour; if the interactive serves fewer, it needs more stations, a shorter turn or a different role (for example a spectacle many people watch while a few play).
- Language-free use: the first action should be obvious without reading -- touch, wave, step, hold up a card -- with text as a second layer in several languages.
- Audience height: Panasonic tuned the sound in its children's zone to ear heights of about 100-120 cm; touch points and sensors need the same thinking for children and wheelchair users.
- Hygiene and wear: surfaces touched thousands of times a day need materials that survive cleaning; contactless sensing (camera, radar, cards) reduces wear and cleaning time.
- Unattended operation: scheduled start-up and shutdown, remote monitoring and restart, and spare parts on site, so a fault costs minutes rather than a day.
- A rehearsal at full scale: build the hardest zone at real size before shipping, and stress-test it beyond expected demand, as Panasonic did.
- Content updates without a rebuild: over six months something will change -- a message, a language, a seasonal event -- so content should be swappable in software.

- [Related: How long an interactive installation takes -- phases and timelines](https://mlabart.com/insights/interactive-installation-timeline/)
- [Related: Motion sensing for interactive installations -- radar, depth, camera and touch compared](https://mlabart.com/insights/motion-sensing-for-interactive-installations/)

- ![General-principle capacity diagram: people per hour equals the number of stations multiplied by 3,600 and divided by the seconds each turn takes. Illustrative arithmetic, not any pavilion's figures: one station with a 60-second turn serves 60 people an hour, four stations serve 240, and 32 floor points with a 30-second turn serve 3,840. For scale, 150,000 visitors arriving over a 12-hour day is about 12,500 people an hour across the whole site.](https://mlabart.com/insights/world-expo-pavilion-interactive-installations/capacity-arithmetic.svg)

## MLABART at an international expo: the Inner Mongolia Pavilion, 2019

MLABART's own expo work is at the 2019 International Horticultural Exhibition in Beijing -- a horticultural expo, not a World Expo -- where it built a draw-and-scan interactive projection for the Inner Mongolia Pavilion. Children draw an animal on paper, a scanner sends the drawing onto an immersive projection wall, and the animal they drew moves through the projected landscape, where they can interact with it.

It uses the same expo logic as the pavilions above: paper and pencils mean no hardware queue and no age limit, many children can draw at once while one scanner handles the hand-off, and the result appears on a shared wall that families gather to watch.

- [MLABART case: Inner Mongolia Pavilion -- draw-and-scan interactive projection](https://mlabart.com/work/horticultural-expo-inner-mongolia/)

- ![A visitor bends towards the immersive projection wall in the Inner Mongolia Pavilion at the 2019 International Horticultural Exhibition in Beijing, where scanned children's drawings of animals, including a white bear, move through a projected forest with flowers projected across the floor.](https://mlabart.com/cases/horticultural-expo-inner-mongolia.jpg)

## What should a pavilion team or sponsor ask an interactive studio?

Questions that separate an Expo-ready proposal from a trade-show idea:

- How many people per hour does each interactive serve, and how was that number calculated?
- What does a visitor do in the first five seconds, without reading anything?
- What happens when a sensor, PC or projector fails at 10 a.m. on a holiday -- who notices, and how long until it works again?
- Which parts can be updated in software during the six months, and who can do it?
- Where will the full-scale test happen before shipping, and what load will it be tested at?
- Which parts of the scope does the studio own -- software, content, hardware, installation, on-site support -- and which belong to the pavilion builder?

## Sources

Attendance figures are from the cited pages; average visitors per day are our calculation (total / days open). Pavilion descriptions come from each maker's own published page and are their work, not MLABART's. The Inner Mongolia Pavilion is described from MLABART's project record. Planning points are general practice, marked as such.

- [Expo 2025 -- Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2025)
- [Expo 2010 -- Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2010)
- [World's fair -- Wikipedia (World Expos and Specialised Expos)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_fair)
- [Dubai Media Office -- Expo 2020 Dubai attendance](https://mediaoffice.ae/en/news/2022/april/02-04/dubai-delivers-on-promise-recording-over-24-million-visits-at-expo-2020-dubai)
- [Panasonic Connect -- The Land of NOMO case study (PDF)](https://docs.connect.panasonic.com/projector/casestudies/entertainment012/pdf/Report_4P_expo2025_NOMO.pdf)
- [Rhizomatiks -- EXPO2025 NTT Pavilion](https://rhizomatiks.com/en/work/expo2025-ntt-pavilion)
- [Ricoh -- Expo 2025 pavilion technologies](https://ricoh.com/about/advertisement/expo2025-kurage)
- [Weart -- Haptic Totem at Expo 2025 Osaka](https://weart.it/blog/touching-the-future-our-haptic-totem-at-expo-2025-osaka/)


## FAQ

### How many people visit a World Expo?

Tens of millions over up to six months. Expo 2025 Osaka counted 29,017,924 visitors in 184 days (paid attendance 25,578,986), Expo 2020 Dubai 24,102,967 visits in 182 days, and Expo 2010 Shanghai about 73 million, with a record of over 1.03 million in one day.

### What interactive technology did pavilions use at Expo 2025 Osaka?

Examples published by the makers include RFID tokens carried through zones and facial-expression analysis (Panasonic), wires with vibration sensors that turn touch into sound and camera-plus-AI projection (NTT Pavilion by Rhizomatiks), an 86-inch multi-touch display with interactive cards (Ricoh), and a haptic totem (Italy Pavilion, by Weart).

### How do you stop an Expo interactive from creating a queue?

Calculate capacity first: people per hour equals stations x 3,600 / seconds per turn. If that is below the pavilion's hourly admissions, add stations or touch points, shorten the turn, or make the piece a spectacle many people watch while a few interact.

### Has MLABART worked at an expo?

Yes. MLABART built a draw-and-scan interactive projection for the Inner Mongolia Pavilion at the 2019 International Horticultural Exhibition in Beijing: children's paper drawings are scanned onto an immersive projection wall, where the animals move and respond. That was a horticultural expo, not a World Expo.



## Related Pages

**See also:** [Immersive Art Exhibitions](https://mlabart.com/solutions/immersive-exhibitions/) | [Digital Exhibition Halls & Showrooms](https://mlabart.com/solutions/digital-exhibition-halls/) | [Motion & Body-Tracking Interactives](https://mlabart.com/solutions/motion-tracking-interactives/) | [Projection Mapping](https://mlabart.com/solutions/projection-mapping/)

---

**MLABART** -- Interaction - Imagination - Innovation

MLABART is an interactive installation and interactive software development studio. We design, program and deliver interactive installations -- motion-sensing games, touch and AI experiences, interactive LED walls, projection mapping, naked-eye 3D and kinetic sculptures -- for mall and New Year's Eve countdown campaigns, trade-show booths and launches, and brand pop-ups, from concept and custom software through fabrication and on-site delivery.

- Web: https://mlabart.com
- Email: mark@touchworld-sh.com
- Phone / WhatsApp: +86 18917292695
- Canonical HTML version: https://mlabart.com/insights/world-expo-pavilion-interactive-installations/