Dec 22, 2025
Building New Value Together with Creators
Sony Technology Exchange Fair 2025 Report
Sony Technology Exchange Fair (STEF) 2025, Sony Group’s technology exchange event, was held at the Group’s headquarters in Shinagawa, Tokyo. For its 53rd iteration, about 800 external creators attended for the first time, and experienced 19 exhibits. This article highlights five of these exhibits.
- 1．Sensory Re:Fusion for LBE: An immersive experience that stimulates visual, auditory, olfactory, and haptic senses
- 2．Feel So Music: Experience music through your senses like never before
- 3．Entertainment Swarm Robot System “groovots”: Stage performance by moving robots
- 4．XYN™ Spatial Content Creation Solution & Related Technologies: Efficient creation of photorealistic, ultra-HD spatial content
- 5．4D Capture Technology: Realistically capture both motion and shape with a single camera
An immersive experience that stimulates visual, auditory, olfactory, and haptic senses
This immersive demonstration allows visitors to experience not only images and sound, but also vibrations, the sensation of wind, and even scents in a realistic and multi-sensory way. For this showcase, a space was created where participants could interact using a prototype controller with built-in haptic feedback, synchronized with video projected onto four massive screens -- three walls and the floor.
Combining vibrations, light, and scents with visuals and sound for a seamless and natural experience requires extremely complex finetuning. Experts in Sony’s imaging (vision), audio (hearing), haptic (touch), and olfactory (smell) technologies worked together through repeated trials to create a unified, multi-sensory experience. The exhibit aimed to stimulate various senses and to create an experience that encourages proactive engagement by participants.
Experience music through your senses like never before
Sony is exploring a new way of experiencing music—one that goes beyond listening through earphones or speakers. By leveraging cross-modal perception, this technology integrates sound with tactile sensations such as gentle wind on the skin and vibrations felt in the chest, creating an immersive experience as if you are bathing in sound.
The development was inspired by a comment from an artist, who noted that the best sound experience at live venues is limited to certain locations. To enable everyone to experience top quality music regardless of location, Sony applied its long-standing research in haptics technology to develop a new device.
This device utilizes vibrations below 20Hz—frequencies beyond human hearing—to generate wind. As a result, it delivers a new sensory experience where the richness of sound and rhythm can be felt throughout the entire body.
In a verification test conducted outside this exhibition, a participant with a hearing disability commented: “For the first time, I was able to get into the music's rhythm of the music in sync with those who can hear.” This is a system that aims to deliver experiences and emotions that surpass imagination.
Stage performance by moving robots
“groovots”, developed based on Sony’s expertise in live solutions and robotics, is a system that synchronizes multiple robots with live performance venue equipment. The team conducted a live stage demonstration featuring a large robot selected as the main performer and smaller robots serving as backup dancers.
To meet creators' needs to produce stage performances exactly as envisioned, the team prioritized integration with the production tools creators regularly use, rather than using specialized tools. Leveraging the Group's strength of having in-house teams with expertise in both entertainment and robotics, the teams across these two fields collaborated to drive development forward. The key point of this technology is that it overcomes the technical challenge of maintaining positional accuracy for multiple robots while achieving high-precision synchronization with the venue's audio signals.
Looking ahead to potential outdoor use, the team aims to create a society where humans and robots coexist.
Efficient creation of photorealistic, ultra-HD spatial content
XR usage and 3DCG content production continue to expand across various domains, from entertainment to industry. Among the challenges are improving technologies and the environment to achieve high quality, low cost, and ease of use.
XYN is a suite of content creation support solutions designed to provide an intuitive and efficient 3DCG production environment for a diverse range of creators, leveraging Sony’s imaging, sensing, and display technologies.
In this exhibit, in addition to showcasing the XYN Spatial capture solution, which can transform real-world objects and environments into photorealistic 3DCG assets, the team also introduced new technologies under development that can edit and search 3D assets. Participants could experience a simulation that allowed them to quickly checks of camera angles and layouts using 3D assets before starting content creation or shooting. The team also held a demonstration where participants could immerse themselves in high-grade content created with XYN assets, using head-mounted displays.
Capturing motion and form realistically with a single camera
As video technology advances to 3D and 4D, one of the major challenges to overcome is the high cost and complexity involved in production, which requires dozens of cameras and large teams to operate. 4D Capture Technology was developed to lower this barrier and enable easy creation of XR content, such as AR and VR. Using Sony’s proprietary sensing devices and signal processing algorithms, this technology allows the capture of an object’s shape and motion with just a single camera, while delivering high frame rate 4D models at 120 fps—a breakthrough in 4D imaging.
This exhibit featured sensing device demonstrations where venue information such as depth and color was captured and displayed on screens, as well as XR content 3D image viewing through Spatial Reality Displays. By combining real-world subjects and Unreal Engine’s 3D assets, the team delivered an immersive visual experience that seamlessly blended the real and the virtual.
The Sony Technology Exchange Fair (STEF) 2025 brought together diverse technologies and talent from Sony Group companies worldwide, fostering lively discussions and creating opportunities for interaction. External creators were able to experience the technologies firsthand and actively engage with engineers, leading to a variety of meaningful exchanges. By connecting creators and engineers directly, the event became a platform for sharing new ideas and perspectives, evoking a sense of future possibilities.
Sony will leverage the fresh ideas and perspectives gained from creators to refine its technologies and strive to deliver unprecedented, inspiring experiences.
