There are playmats where you build the roads in seconds, a ballpit where the balls are as big as you, and a drawing-board where your doodles come to life. This is Team Lab's "Theme Park of the Future" .. but it isn't really a theme park. It's an attempt to bring projection mapping, motion gestures into contact with fundamental playtime activities — and even expand on kids' creativity. You just need a handful of projectors, some giant walls, and a scanner or two.
Welcome to a brightly colored future
The entrance to the exhibition, which runs for the next few months at the Miraikan in Tokyo, Japan, is signposted with a giant moving mural featuring all kinds of animals. There's no interactive element: it's very much like any old mural in that way, but try telling that to a hyperactive five-year-old raised on iPads.
Kids like animals
Like a giant interactive watercolor, the second area allows kids to pet the animals, or make them simply disappear. Various parts of the exhibit neatly incorporate art into the activities — another thing the project aims to get kids interested in at a young age — and this is one of the more gorgeous ones.
Digital hopscotch
Because kids still need to move around occasionally. More projected antics: The 'floating' shapes are able to detect little feet and respond with ambient tones and water ripples. Hit all the symbols for choral wonder.
Making drawings come to life
Much better than being stuck to a refrigerator. Once you've designed and colored in your car / spaceship / UFO, it gets scanned-in, digitized and brought to life…
I drew that
See that kid, dwarfed by the projection on this hulking big screen? He couldn't be happier that his truck was actually driving around in front of his eyes.
He's gifted, this one
My name is Mat and this is my fish. Unfortunately, I drew it upside down, which meant, when scanned…
Maybe not
… it came alive upside-down. Beaten by children (again).
Drawings, alive
You draw your truck, spaceship or upside-down fish, and it goes up on this giant screen. Kinda jealous of these future kids. Jerks.
The trains go there
Using projection mapping, and an unspecified camera to detect colored blocks, this table can make pretty much any sort of cityscape you'd like. Red blocks are linked together by train tracks, and depending on the number of blocks, it upgrades the type of train that runs between them. Four blocks spawns a bullet train.
Planes, trains and automobiles
The software is clever enough to put bridges over rivers, and if there's too much space between blocks — it's a big table — it'll make separate roads, tracks and rivers that act independently. In case some kids simply can't share.
The best ballpit
There's some educational deep-and meaningfuls behind the giant balls. They apparently help children gauge spatial awareness — and not just in two dimensions. There are giant balls hanging from the ceiling, and kids also have to learn how move around (or bounce aimlessly off the balls) while others are doing the same. The balls change color when you touch them, and this hue spreads between balls when they come into contact with each other.