Yesterday we went to the newest installation of the art collective Teamlab. This is the new version of the ‘Borderless’ attraction I visited six years ago, now bigger and in a new location.

Photos hardly do this place justice. It’s a large series of interconnected rooms, each themed around art made with light and sound. The first room for instance has velvet walls and a carpeted on which flowers are projected. They move and change continuously and you are surrounded with them.

The second room is the largest and contains a rock on which water continuously falls and flows down into the room. Flowers occasionally bloom and float away, and birds fly around the room in wide arcs. It’s not real of course, just projected, but it is very convincing and reacts to people as they move around inside the room. For instance I went and stood atop the rock and the water flowed around me.

We’ve been to other Teamlab attractions before so the basic technology didn’t dazzle us as it does the first time, but it’s still extremely impressive how the projectors work in unison to create seamless worlds hardly disrupted by people walking around inside them. This being the latest Borderless, it seems the tech had received an upgrade as well and the amount of elements moving around seemed to have increased.

The above room was a forest of mushroom-like plants which you could sway and move around under. As you walked through the room they became shorter until they were only knee-high and you walked through them. It was very cool.

This was a room with strings of lights handing down from a high ceiling. I’ve been in similar before, but the light density was higher here and they cleverly used the strings to move 3D objects around inside them. Think of each tiny LED being a voxel and you can (almost) imagine how cool this looked.

The room full of lanterns at the old Borderless had received a significant upgrade and now contained mercury lamps with LEDs inside that pulsed between various colours. The above photo may be difficult to interpret: it’s a room with the walls, floor and ceiling mirrors with these light gloves suspended from the ceiling. Walking around inside was dazzling.

They had a cafe inside where you could buy cups of tea. As with all the other rooms, it’s mostly dark inside but once the tea was placed on the table in front of you flowers bloomed inside. This was of course achieved by projectors in the ceiling but we quickly determined it wasn’t a fixed location and the projectors ‘found’ the cup no matter where you put it. Even better, if you let the flower bloom a little and moved the cup the flower would explode into petals and drift away while a new one formed. Once you drunk the tea the effect ended, which still puzzles me: how did the projectors know the tea was gone? This was impressive technology.

For both of us the best room was one containing a gigantic spaghetti-track on which reflective spheres slowly moved around on. As you walked through and around the track the globes pulsed through different colours. The music and lighting and weird little spheres gave this room an alien vibe, and it was like nothing I’d seen before.

This is a very popular attraction – near mandatory for tourists since it’s quite unique – and we intentionally arrived at opening time (8:30 am) to avoid the crowds. This worked and there were very few people in each room when we entered. By around 10 the crowds had caught up, and you can compare the above pic with the second one in this post to see the difference (both in crowd size and the display in the room).

I agree with the tourist guides: if you’re ever in Tokyo go to one of the Teamlab attractions. They’re wonderful and worth your time.