Create a visible ripple effect as you move within this dazzling interactive infinity room by Japanese collective teamLab, producing your own unique wave patterns influenced by your gestures, movements and speed. For their new installation at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, entitled ‘Moving Creates Vortices and Vortices Create Movement,’ teamLab took inspiration from the ocean and all of the ways in which the currents and flows of water are altered by objects and environmental conditions.

This video shows off the stunning effects as a lone visitor makes her way through the room. You can see as each of her steps results in a flurry of tiny light particles that transform into lines and then form patterns, ultimately joining together into the vortices referenced by the name. The faster she moves, the stronger her ‘force’ is exerted upon the waves.

“If a person is not moving or there are no more people, no flow will occur and nothing will be present in the space,” says teamLab. “Works are born and continue to transform under the influence of people’s movement.”

“In the ocean, complicated terrain such as an island produces flow velocity difference and a vortex is generated. Vortices swirl up the carcasses of organisms sunk to the bottom of the ocean, producing nutritious seawater. This becomes a source of nutrition for plankton to grow and nourishes the sea life. Vortices therefore contribute to enriching the ocean.”

Escaping the convoluted confines of the conventional hedge-in-a-garden, the labyrinth takes on ever more complex forms to better confuse you with, especially when mirrors, glass or mechanical elements are involved. These immersive installations use unusual materials and disorienting configurations to encourage visitors to wander, explore, face uncertainty about their paths and pause to marvel at the beauty of it all.

Maze Made of Light by Brut Deluxe

This immersive light maze made of acrylic panels with dichroic film applied to one side creates a reflective rainbow you can walk through. Once you’re inside, circles cut into the acrylic transmit colors from other areas of the maze. ‘Yûzhóu’ was craeated by architecture and design studio Brut Deluxe for the Luneng Sanya Bay Light and Art Festival in Hainan, China.

Vertical Maze Tower in Dubai

This 56-story skyscraper in Dubai is the world’s tallest vertical maze according to Guinness. DAR Consult worked with maze designer Adrian Fisher to design the eye-catching accent, highlighting it in thousands of LED lights to make it stand out after dark.

Big Maze by Bjarke Ingels Group at the National Building Museum

With high birch panel walls that tower over you along the edges shrinking to waist-height at the very center, this maze by architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group gets easier the navigate the further you go. The life-sized indoor maze was assembled inside the National Building Museum in Washington DC. “The concept is simple: as you travel deeper into a maze, your path typically becomes more convoluted,” say the architects. “What if we invert this scenario and create a maze that brings clarity and visual understanding upon reaching the heart of the labyrinth?”

Steel Labyrinth by Gijs van Vaerenbergh at C-Mine Art Centre, Belgium

The architect duo known as Gijs Van Vaerenbergh experimented with the classic form of the labyrinth for a sculptural installation at the center of the C-Mine Arts Centre in Genk, Belgium. The design, made of 5mm-thick steel plates weighing a total of 186 tons, is envisioned as a composition of walls and voids that strategically frame various areas with cut-outs. An accompanying tower outside the maze allows visitors to get a bird’s eye view of the entire thing.

Salt Labyrinths by Motoi Yamamoto

This labyrinth is so minuscule in scale, only insects could ever hope to navigate it, but it’s a wonder to take in from above. Artist Motoi Yamamoto is known for his intricate temporary sculptures made of salt, creating complex arrangements that almost seem organically formed.

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Modern Mazes 15 Labyrinths Made Of Glass Steel Light And Salt

Take a seat inside this human-sized zoetrope, pull the bar back and forth and watch as fairytale imagery come to life around you. ‘Loop’ is the main installation at this year’s Luminothérapie, an interactive public art installation competition that takes place in Quebec each year. Developed by artists Olivier Girouard and Jonathan Villenueve in collaboration with Ottoblix, ‘Loop’ tells 13 different stories in each of the oversized illuminated circles placed along a street in Montreal.

The zoetrope, in case you’re not familiar, is a pre-film animation device that displays a sequence of images within a cylinder to produce an illusion of motion; users look through slits in the cylinder to watch it. ‘Loop’ takes this traditional object and updates it with interactivity and light, asking users to power the spinning cylinder themselves. A flickering strobe light illuminates the monochrome images lining the inside.

‘Loop’ took three months of design work and 800 hours of assembly to complete. One of the designers makes a living building Lego sets, while the other has been designing since he was just a child. Explaining how they came up with the concept, Olivier Girouard says Villanueve took inspiration from mechanical interventions at Berlin’s Technology Museum.

“Thinking of hamster wheels, we decided to build a vertical zoetrope. So we combined three mechanical elements: the railway push-car (like the ones made famous by Bugs Bunny cartoons), the music box and the zoetrope. We came up with the idea and sketched out the project just one week before the deadline for submitting proposals!”

“Our invention reminds me of the Chimera, the mythological three-headed beast born of the intersection of different universes,” says Villanueve. “I like this more or less unclassifiable hybrid machine. Is it a toy? A projection device? A kind of lighting? Looking at previous Luminothérapie pieces, we noticed that installations that were not only participatory but also collaborative, where participants had to act together to produce a result were – in our opinion – the more successful projects and the most appreciated by the public.”

Loop will light up the Place des Festivals in Montreal until January 29th, when it will take off on a tour of Quebec cities. Check out last year’s installation – a series of illuminated see-saws.

Dangling from a darkened ceiling like strange bioluminescent blooms, hundreds of high-tech lamps respond to the movements of people in the room, glowing in a particular color that resonates outward, spreading to more and more lamps. This chain reaction shifts as observers navigate the space, contrasting with the patterns created by others. ‘Forest of Resonating Lamps’ is an immersive installation by Japanese collective Teamlab, created for Maison et Objet 2016.

Occupying the junction of art and technology, the installation is not just about a single decorative object, beautiful as it may be. The lamps themselves are made of Murano glass and equipped with LED bulbs, hung from the gallery ceiling in a space with mirrored walls that multiply them so they seem to go on forever, a la Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room installations.

As an observer approaches a lamp, it shines brightly, emitting a color tone that is transmitted to lamps nearby. If you’re the only person in the room, the light is entirely centered upon you, but as soon as someone else enters, you become aware of the ripple effect created by their own movements. While the lamps seem to be scattered randomly throughout the space, they’re actually placed to form a continuous line from select lamps that act as starting points.

“The planar arrangement of the lamps is staggered in zigzag to fill a space, staying in a perfectly ordered grid,” says Teamlab. “This is the first constraint. The second constraint is the height and width of the room and the pathway that people walk through, thus creating a ‘boundary condition.’ The third constraint is that all the lamps, when connected to its two closest lamps three-dimensionally, form a unicursal pattern with the same start and end points.”

“The arrangement of the lamps thus created is beautiful not only in an immobilized, static kind of way, but more so in a dynamic way caused by people approaching these lamps. It demonstrates the space of new era: the space freely designed through digital technology, and adapting the change and movement made by people’s existence in it.”