The Eureka Park section at CES 2025 in Las Vegas is an exhibition area dedicated to thousands of startups and early-stage products from across the globe. Our reporting team visited the space organized specifically for Japanese startups and discovered a few that are developing innovative technologies that could potentially be applied to 3D computer graphics modeling, XR, and gaming. Among the standouts were Tokyo-based CalTa that developed the digital twin platform Trancity — and Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo’s exhibit of its ongoing Feel Tech system.

CalTa’s Trancity generates digital 3D models of objects from 2D photos or videos. Users can then view the objects virtually on-screen in a 360-degree manner and also make precise measurements. The company envisions users generating “3D models from videos, drones and smartphones to manage railways, roads, labor and infrastructure.”

We viewed a live demonstration of digitizing an anime figurine generated only from MPEG-4 videos of it shot from various angles by a regular smartphone. The CalTa team also showed an entire city’s digital 3D model generated from Google Maps’ Street View photos and 360-degree images.

Trancity’s current use cases includes infrastructure management by providing its digital twin online that can be updated via drone videos or surveillance cameras that routinely capture imagery from monitored modules at various distances. The platform can integrate imagery of different capture devices into layers of an object.

Video effects for film and game designs often call for manipulating 3D models of characters or backgrounds to create scenarios. But the initial step of creating these models is often time-consuming (for instance, when drawn by hand or via motion capture). The workflow can become significantly more efficient if this crucial first step can be streamlined.

We also visited NTT Docomo’s Feel Tech exhibit. The far-reaching objective of Feel Tech is to develop a Human Augmentation Platform that shares human senses and even emotions from one person to another. Their most demonstrable achievement now is probably the haptic sharing FeelFuse device, which is made up of two haptic-feedback motorized rings for the thumb and forefinger. The wearer can then experience highly precise haptic sensing.

The live demonstration featured a Meta Quest 3 headset in a VR setting where the user interacted with a dog. Perhaps this portends to FeelFuse’s potentials for adaption in gaming and XR.