The title Nox derives from the Latin word for “night.”
Nox is a documentary XR experience inspired by the creator’s personal experience with PTSD. Through a first-person perspective, it examines mental illness—an issue that continues to be stigmatized and treated as taboo in contemporary Japanese society.
Utilizing XR technology, the work offers an interactive and deeply immersive experience, creating a lasting impact on both the mind and body of the participant through a head-mounted display (HMD).
Embedded Files
Officially selected for and exhibited at CineMart Lightroom, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2026
A controller-free VR/MR experience by Rio Nakada
Synopsis
Nox is an autobiographical immersive experience that explores trauma, dissociation, and the fragile boundary between existence and disappearance. Drawing from the director’s lived experience of complex PTSD, the work transforms psychological states such as identity fragmentation, depersonalization, and Alice in Wonderland Syndrome into spatial narrative and embodied interaction. Guided by a quiet voice, participants move through a dreamlike world composed of memories, drawings, sounds, and fragments of consciousness created from within traumatic experience itself. Hands distort, space collapses, perception shifts, and the participant’s own body becomes part of a landscape where reality is unstable and the self begins to dissolve. Through controller-free interaction, VR/MR transitions, and intimate first-person storytelling, Nox invites participants not simply to observe trauma from the outside, but to enter the unstable space it creates. Within a world shaped by loss, isolation, and dissociation, the work traces a quiet movement toward beauty, connection, and the will to keep living.
Selected — CineMart Lightroom at IFFR 2026 (Rotterdam)
Award — AIxR Creative Award 2025, Excellence
Award — NICOGRAPH 2024 Demo Exhibition Award (Tactus)
Exhibited — Beyond the Frame Festival, Tokyo University of the Arts, 2026
Exhibited by invitation — CEDEC 2025
Adopted — METI "Sofu" Creator Support Program (2 consecutive years)
Experience Design
Nox is a controller-free embodied XR experience — and a 19-minute authored work — in which psychological states are translated into hand-tracked interactions, spatial audio, real-time 3D Gaussian Splatting, and a cross-modal MR water system.
Nox is structured around a single constraint: no controllers. Every interaction is performed with bare hands alone. Five hand-tracking interactions unfold across thirteen scenes in three phases — collapse → fragmentation → reintegration — culminating in a transition from VR to MR.
① Virtual Smartphone Scroll
A mundane gesture. The participant scrolls through a virtual phone with their bare hands, establishing ordinary embodied reality as the baseline — so that its subsequent collapse is felt in the body.
② Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
The participant looks at their own hands. The hands begin to swell and distort in real time, driven by Meta Quest 3 hand tracking. This is not a visual effect. It is a reconstruction of a perceptual disturbance the director has personally experienced — and the participant inhabits it rather than observes it.
③ Head-Tracking Dissociation
The visual field fractures in response to head orientation. Hand input is deliberately absent: the loss of agency becomes the interaction itself.
④ Light-Particle Interaction
In a womb-like environment, particles respond to the direction and quality of hand movement — not discrete gestures. The hands become gravitational sources. The interaction enacts the release of a fragmented self.
⑤ Tactus — Cross-Modal MR Water
The headset transitions to MR passthrough. A luminous body of water appears suspended in the participant's own physical room. Bare hands tear it apart and fuse it back together. Participants may submerge their heads inside to view its interior. Its visual behavior — soft, responsive, organically deforming — is designed to elicit tactile-like impressions without any haptic hardware.
Between ④ and ⑤, a photorealistic scene rendered in real-time 3D Gaussian Splatting marks the passage from fragmented interiority toward the final reintegration.
Technical stack: Unity · Meta Quest 3 (hand tracking + MR passthrough) · Windows PC (RTX 5080) · USB-C Link cable (ceiling-suspended) · Spatialograph Maker by VoxelKei (3DGS renderer)
Director's note
Do you remember a moment when someone’s words deeply hurt you?It is often said that by forgetting painful memories and difficult experiences, people gain the strength to move forward.But what if that pain were carved deep into the heart, never to disappear?With the slightest trigger, buried painful memories return with vivid clarity.
That is the reality of PTSD.
Nox was born from my own experience of being wounded by prolonged stress.Through my struggles with social anxiety, hallucinations, and dissociation, the work depicts both the world I once saw and the world I wished to see.Nox is a story dedicated to everyone who carries wounds of the heart.
Comments from Experts and Related Professionals
Comment from Naotaka Fujii
President, Digital Hollywood University
When I heard that Rio’s MR work Nox had been selected for Lightroom at the IFFR CineMart of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, I genuinely did a fist pump as a fan.
Nox transforms the conflicts and pain that Rio herself has carried into beautiful, delicate, and powerful visuals and interactions. It is a work that gently teaches us that even while carrying darkness within us, we can still move forward.
I will continue to wholeheartedly support her as she takes this challenge as a starting point and goes on to light sparks of hope and courage in the hearts of many people around the world.
Comment from Yoichi Ochiai
Media Artist / Professor, University of Tsukuba / Associate Professor, The University of Tokyo
I have been watching Rio Nakada’s activities since she was in junior high school through Yoichi Ochiai School.
I am cheering her on as she continues to grow and become an artist. Congratulations on this achievement!
Comment from Katsutoshi Machiba
XR Producer / Adjunct Lecturer, Graduate School of Tokyo University of the Arts
My heartfelt congratulations on being selected for the inaugural Lightroom at CineMart, International Film Festival Rotterdam.
The fact that Rio Nakada is the first artist from Japan to be selected for this memorable first edition is proof that her extraordinary talent and the power of her work have been recognized on the world stage. I offer my sincere congratulations.
Nox is rooted in Nakada’s own profound experiences and the inner world that emerged from them. I believe this journey has been more than a creative endeavor; it has also been a challenge of confronting her own past and overcoming a major barrier.
I am convinced that what gave her the strength to break through that barrier was both Nakada’s sincere character and the presence of collaborators who resonated with her passionate commitment to the work.
This honor marks only the first step in Nakada’s journey. I look forward to seeing her achieve even greater success in the future.
Creator
Rio Nakada Artist, Engineer, and Director
Born in 2007.Rio Nakada is a Japanese artist, filmmaker, and creative technologist whose work explores perception, consciousness, memory, and embodied experience through immersive technologies.
Drawing from both personal experience and interdisciplinary research, Nakada creates XR works that investigate the fragile boundaries between reality and imagination, self and environment, presence and absence. Her practice combines storytelling, interactive design, human-computer interaction, and emerging technologies to transform invisible psychological and sensory experiences into shared spaces that audiences can physically encounter.
Working across virtual reality, mixed reality, spatial computing, and sensory interfaces, she is particularly interested in how technology can reveal aspects of human experience that are difficult to communicate through language alone. Her projects often explore themes of perception, dissociation, touch, memory, and the relationship between body and mind.
Nakada's work has been presented internationally through film festivals, academic conferences, and media art platforms. Her XR documentary Nox was selected for CineMart Lightroom at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), while her mixed reality research project Tactus received the Demo Exhibition Award at Nicograph and was later exhibited by invitation at CEDEC.
In 2022, she became the first Japanese female and youngest recipient of the Apple WWDC Swift Student Challenge. Her work has also been supported by initiatives of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Currently studying at Keio University’s Faculty of Environment and Information Studies (SFC), Nakada continues to develop new forms of immersive storytelling and sensory expression at the intersection of art, technology, and human perception.
Selected Achievements
2026
Official Selection: CineMart Lightroom, 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR 2026) [First Japanese work in program history]
Solo Exhibition: "Melting Contours, Overflowing Water"
Grant Awardee: "Sofu" Creator and Entertainment Startup Incubator Program (Film/Video Division), under the FY2024 Supplementary Budget of the Government of Japan
2025
Invited Exhibition: CEDEC 2025 Academic Committee (AC) Interactive Session
Grand Prize (Student Division): AIxR CREATIVE AWARD 2025
Selected Artist: NEXT YOUNG ARTIST AWARD 2025 (NYAA 2025), Art & New Media Division
Invited Exhibition: Asia-Pacific Mensa Gathering
2024
Grant Awardee: "Sofu" Digital Creator Talent Development Project, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan
Award: Demo Exhibition Award, NICOGRAPH 2024 (The Society for Art and Science)
Technical Paper: Lead Author and Presenter, NICOGRAPH 2024
Solo Exhibition: "Tactus: Echoes in the Flow"
Technical Training: Completed Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) Max Summer School
2023
Grant Awardee: Project Support Division, Agency for Cultural Affairs Project to Nurture Media Arts Creators, Government of Japan
Nomination: Generation Award, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) "Inno-vation" Program
2022
Winner: Apple WWDC22 Swift Student Challenge [Youngest-ever & First Japanese Female Winner]
Nomination: Generation Award, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) "Inno-vation" Program
Curator & Space Designer: Hosted and designed a self-produced virtual exhibition
2021
Participant: MIT Media Lab Summer Camp 2021
Machiba Katsutoshi
Producer
Part-time Lecturer at the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts.
Founder and organizer of Beyond The Frame Festival, Japan’s first international film festival dedicated specifically to XR.
He studied filmmaking in the United States, and has worked as a TV director, a Japanese-language version producer at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Japan, and was in charge of Gear VR at Samsung Electronics Japan.
He has produced numerous VR projects that have received high acclaim at film festivals in Japan and abroad. His works have been nominated as competition pieces for Venice Immersive, the VR section of the Venice International Film Festival, for five consecutive years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Staff
Actor / Animation: Rio Nakada
Modeling / Scenery: Rio Nakada
Music: brightwaltz
Interaction Developer: Rio Nakada
Technical Supporter: Yo Sasaki, Ken Sonobe
Visual Effect: Kota Masuda
MA / Compositer: Rio Nakada
Producer: Katsutoshi Machiba
Director: Rio Nakada
Cooperation
TOKYO NODE LAB, KST EVENTS, RHINO STUDIOS
Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry FY2023 Digital and Other Creator Talent Development Project (Video/Game Creator Development Support Project) “Sofu”FY2024 METI Supplementary Budget: Creator and Entertainment Startup Development Project “Sofu”
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