A Glimpse of the Future: Our Magical Experience with Shinjuku’s Cross 3D Billboard

We’ve always been cat people — the kind who stop to pet strays, follow too many cat accounts online, and plan trips around cat cafes without much shame about it. So when we first came across videos of this 3D billboard during the pandemic, it didn’t take much convincing. A giant, impossibly realistic cat sitting on top of a building in Tokyo, watching the crowd below? That went straight to the top of our list, pandemic or not, and once travel opened back up, we made sure it was one of the first things we did in Tokyo.

We took a taxi from the Hilton Tokyo to Shinjuku Station, then made our way toward the East Exit, and there it was, right where the 3D videos said it would be — perched above the crosswalk, a massive calico cat looking down at the crowd like it owned the block. As certified cat people, we were basically useless the moment we saw it. We ended up standing there for a good twenty minutes just watching it blink, stretch, and occasionally meow, completely unbothered by the crowd of other people doing exactly the same thing around us.

The 3D screen itself is a curved, L-shaped LED display, about 154.7 square meters, wrapped around the corner of the Cross Shinjuku Building. The curve is the trick behind the illusion — combined with the angle of the street and the height of the building, it tricks your brain into reading the image as three-dimensional even though you’re just looking at a flat screen. It’s been running since July 2021, and it’s become enough of a fixture that it functions almost like Shinjuku’s answer to Shibuya’s Hachiko statue, except this one grooms itself and naps on the hour.

What we didn’t know before visiting, and what made us love it even more once we found out, is that the cat isn’t just a generic animation. It’s male, which is unusual for a calico in real life, and one of the black patches on its coat is actually shaped like Shinjuku Ward — a small design touch a lot of visitors miss entirely.

The production company behind it, Omnibus Japan, spent a long time studying real cat behavior to get the movement right, right down to how the pupils dilate. The 3D cat is even based on a real animal, one named Natsuko who lived to 23 before passing away in 2018. Knowing there was a real cat behind all that animation made the whole thing feel less like advertising tech and more like a tribute, which is exactly the kind of detail that gets us every time.

The 3D billboard runs a loop of scenes from around 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., with the cat’s activity shifting through the day — waking up in the morning, more playful in the afternoon and evening, and eventually settling down to sleep as the display shuts off for the night. We happened to catch the wind-down part of the cycle, and watching a giant digital cat curl up and drift off was somehow one of the most soothing things we did on the whole trip.

We’re clearly not the only ones who got attached. The account behind the 3D cat posts daily clips online, and brands have designed one-off animations featuring it, including a Nissan spot that gave the cat its own little car to ride around the screen. There’s also a second 3D screen reportedly being built nearby, expected around 2027, designed to sync up with this one so the cat could eventually move between both displays — which, if you love cats even half as much as we do, is reason enough to plan a return trip.

If you’re a cat person visiting Tokyo, do not skip this. It costs nothing, takes maybe twenty minutes, and it’s an easy stop to fold into an evening in Shinjuku — just show up near the East Exit plaza and wait a few minutes for the cat to do something. We’ve seen a lot of “must-see” attractions that didn’t live up to the hype, but this one did, and then some. Standing there with a crowd of strangers, all of us quietly cooing at a digital cat, might be one of our favorite unplanned moments from the entire trip.