日本語

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).

Officially selected for Venice Immersive at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival　Press release

Notes and background information for viewing the film

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.

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.

A controller-free VR/MR experience by Rio Nakada

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)

Creative Producer's Message

"Nothing About Us Without Us" — Reclaiming the Voice of the Lived Experience
Nox is an XR film conceived, directed, and technically led by NaKaDaRio, an artist living with Complex PTSD (CPTSD), trauma, and dissociation.
Rather than presenting mental illness as an external subject of observation, Nox is a work created from within lived experience. It is an attempt to reclaim authorship over a story that has too often been told by others.
In recent years, the principle of "Nothing About Us Without Us" has become increasingly important in discussions surrounding disability, mental health, and minority representation. For generations, mental illness has largely been interpreted through the voices of clinicians, researchers, journalists, and fiction creators, while those living these experiences have rarely been given the opportunity to become the primary authors of their own narratives.
Yet no one understands this inner world more deeply than those who have lived through it.
Nox seeks to bring that perspective into the immersive language of XR.

 Refusing to Turn Mental Illness into Horror
Throughout the history of cinema and television, dissociative identities have frequently been portrayed as symbols of horror, madness, violence, or narrative twists.
While dramatically effective, such portrayals have also contributed to misunderstanding and stigma surrounding dissociative disorders.
Nox deliberately takes a different approach.
Within this work, dissociated identities are not monsters to be defeated. They are portrayed as protective parts that emerged to help the protagonist survive overwhelming trauma.
This perspective resonates with contemporary trauma research, which increasingly understands dissociation as an adaptive survival response rather than a manifestation of danger.
Near the end of the experience, the protagonist does not defeat these identities.
Instead, they reunite.
Only then does the protagonist recognize them as companions who have silently carried unbearable pain in order to protect a life that could continue.

XR as a Medium for Sharing Inner Experience
Nox is not intended to explain mental illness, nor is it designed as a simulation for shock or spectacle.
Participants stand where the protagonist stands.
They inhabit the same fractured spaces, perceive the same distortions, experience the same uncertainty, and ultimately share the moment of reunion.
Rather than observing another person's inner world through a screen, XR allows participants to enter that world and inhabit it from within.
This capacity to share subjective experience is what makes immersive media uniquely powerful.

Creating from Within
Creating an artwork while continuously confronting one's own trauma requires immense emotional, physical, and creative endurance.
As both director and lead engineer, NaKaDaRio developed the artistic vision as well as the technical implementation of Nox, navigating the realities of trauma while bringing the project to completion.
Works created under these circumstances remain exceptionally rare.
Yet rarity is not the point.
What matters is that, when mental illness is represented, the voices and perspectives of those who live with it can occupy the center of the creative process.
*Nox* is not an advocacy work that observes mental illness from the outside.
It is an artistic work that invites audiences into an inner landscape through the perspective of someone who has lived it.
We hope *Nox* contributes to a broader conversation—one that moves beyond fear and stigma toward empathy, understanding, and a more authentic language for representing mental health.

Comments from Experts and Related Professionals

Comment from Masahiro Yamaguchi
CEO, STYLY, Inc.

Rio Nakada, heartfelt congratulations on the selection of NOX for the Venice International Film Festival.
Turning pain into a work of art is not the same as showing someone an open wound. It is, I believe, the act of redesigning its shape, its temperature, and even the fear of touching it—reconstructing it as a world that someone else can enter.
You built every layer of that world yourself, down to its deepest foundations. Technology does not merely support your expression — technology itself has become your language.
Through experiencing NOX, I came to feel that even the sensations I had never been able to put into words were allowed to exist in this world.
As one of the people who have been saved by NOX, I am deeply moved to see this work reach Venice, and I find that beautiful.

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

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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