teamLab Planets TOKYO

teamLab Planets Tokyo is an immersive art museum created by teamLab, an international, interdisciplinary collective founded in 2001. The group includes artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects who explore the intersection of art, science, technology, and the natural world through collaborative creation.

At teamLab Planets Tokyo, visitors step into a body-immersive environment where the boundaries between self and surroundings dissolve. The museum challenges conventional perceptions - where the world is typically divided into separate, bordered elements - and instead invites guests to transcend these mental and physical divisions. The installations evoke a sense of continuity, where time, space, and self flow together in an unbroken, fluid spectrum.

teamLab's works are held in major museum and gallery collections worldwide.

Installations

Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People – Infinity

In this installation, koi fish appear to swim freely across an endless expanse of water. Visitors walk barefoot through a shallow pool, and their presence influences the movement of the koi, which also interact with one another in real time.

When a koi touches a person, it transforms into a burst of seasonal flowers - cherry blossoms in spring, chrysanthemums in autumn - reflecting the time of year. Each koi traces delicate lines across the water’s surface, creating a continuously evolving visual composition shaped by human interaction.

This artwork is not pre-recorded; it is generated in real time by a computer program that responds to every movement. No moment is ever repeated. The scene that unfolds exists only in that instant - a one-time-only experience that disappears the moment it passes.

Floating Flower Garden

In this immersive installation, thousands of live orchids fill the space, forming a floating, three-dimensional garden. As visitors enter, the flowers gently rise above them, creating a personal space within the dense floral environment. When people draw near one another, their individual spaces merge, forming a shared realm of movement and scent.

Inspired by Zen philosophy and traditional Japanese gardens, the work invites quiet reflection on the interconnectedness of humans and nature. As one gazes at the blossoms, a subtle sense emerges - as if the flowers are observing the viewer in return - blurring the line between subject and object.

The orchids used are air plants, capable of thriving without soil by drawing moisture from the air. They bloom and grow continuously in mid-air. Orchids are often regarded as the pinnacle of plant evolution, known for their immense diversity and for co-evolving with highly specific pollinators. Their fragrance shifts with the time of day, becoming most intense at night, in tune with the rhythms of their ecological partners.

This artwork invites visitors to become part of the living garden, dissolving the boundaries between body, space, and nature.

Athletics Forest

Athletics Forest is a collection of physically interactive installations designed to stimulate the mind through movement. It challenges the modern tendency to separate body and intellect, inviting visitors to explore complex, three-dimensional environments that activate both.

Modern education often emphasises stillness and abstraction. Yet real-world intelligence is multi-sensory and spatial: it involves reading expressions, navigating space, and responding dynamically. This form of spatial cognition - thinking through the body - is essential for creativity, memory, and high-dimensional problem-solving.

Athletics Forest aims to restore this connection between movement and thought, offering a playful, immersive environment where intelligence unfolds through full-body exploration.

• Rapidly Rotating Bouncing Spheres in the Caterpillar House

Colourful spheres spin rapidly, then pause as visitors approach, making them safe to jump on. Stepping on spheres of the same colour in succession causes them to burst, releasing energy. With enough successful jumps, a caterpillar appears - and if the streak continues, many fill the room. This installation transforms rhythm and movement into a joyful ecosystem of bouncing creatures.

• Multi Jumping Universe

A trampoline-like floor lets visitors bounce higher than usual. As you jump, you gather stardust, form new stars, and witness their life cycles—from birth to supernova or black hole. This installation turns the cosmos into a physical experience, where the formation and death of stars unfold beneath your feet.

• Aerial Climbing through a Flock of Coloured Birds

Suspended rods float in three dimensions, allowing visitors to traverse the air carefully. Each step lights up the rods and triggers musical tones, while flocks of digital birds fly overhead, changing colour based on nearby movement. The birds mimic real flocking behaviour, creating a constantly shifting harmony between sound, motion, and colour.

• Balance Stepping Stones in the Invisible World

Stepping stones sway and emit sound as you cross them. Each stone is tied to a pattern representing microscopic life, revealing a hidden ecosystem. This balance-based journey encourages mindfulness and connection with often-overlooked worlds beneath our feet.

• Graffiti Nature

Draw animals on paper, then watch them come to life on screen. These creatures eat, reproduce, and die based on their behaviour and interaction with others. The ecosystem evolves dynamically, and your creations live - or vanish - within it. People’s movements influence the environment, creating a rich, responsive world shaped by all participants.

• Sketch Waterfall Droplets

Draw a shape, and it transforms into a droplet in a digital waterfall. These droplets behave like real water when clustered, but like bouncing balls when alone. The installation shows how collective behaviour creates properties that don’t exist in isolation - mirroring how life and complexity emerge from simple parts.

• Beating Earth

In this shifting, three-dimensional environment, the usual alignment of vision, balance, and perception is disrupted. As the space undulates and tilts, visitors must adapt physically, engaging with space in new and challenging ways.

• Sliding through the Fruit Field

Slide down a slope where digital fruits grow. As your body collides with floating water and bee balls, energy transfers to the environment - causing seeds to sprout, flowers to bloom, and fruits to ripen. This playful piece visualises symbiosis: the essential interdependence of plants and pollinators.

• Flutter of Butterflies from the Caterpillar House

Butterflies emerge from caterpillars created in the Caterpillar House. When touched, they flutter away - ephemeral and reactive, reflecting the fragile beauty of transformation and connection.

• Autonomous Abstraction

Dots blink and emit tones based on synchronised cycles influenced by nearby points. When touched, their rhythms scatter but quickly reorganise. This phenomenon - called self-organisation - demonstrates how order emerges spontaneously from independent parts, seen in nature, society, and the universe.

• Existence in the Flow Creates Vortices

Visitors walking upstream in a digital flow create vortices behind them. Though stable in form, these whirlpools are constantly shifting. The piece reflects life itself: a structure maintained through continuous flow and exchange with the environment. Viewers move freely through this space, which blends seamlessly with the artwork.

Future Park

Future Park is a participatory art space centred on the concept of co-creation - the idea that people can build and transform something together through shared interaction. Unlike artworks created by a single hand, these installations evolve through the ongoing contributions of many.

This principle is at the heart of teamLab Future Park, an experimental educational project designed to nurture collaborative creativity. It turns often solitary creative activities into interactive, collective experiences. Rooted in teamLab’s broader vision of “changing relationships among people”, Future Park transforms the presence of others into a positive, inspiring force.

• Sketch Umwelt World

Visitors draw animals - such as dolphins, hawks, butterflies, or airplanes - which are then brought to life in 3D and take flight in a shared digital space. Each creature can be interacted with or even piloted via smartphone, offering a glimpse into how different species perceive the world.

Based on the concept of “Umwelt” - the idea that every living being experiences its surroundings differently - this installation lets you explore other sensory worlds. Dolphins use echolocation, hawks see dual perspectives, and butterflies perceive nearly 360 degrees. Through playful interaction, visitors experience how perception shapes reality.

• A Table Where Little People Live

Tiny animated people inhabit the surface of a table and respond to the shapes and movements of hands or objects placed on it. They climb, jump, and slide - reacting in ways grounded in Newton’s laws of motion.

What begins as simple play becomes a fun, intuitive exploration of cause and effect, physics, and interaction - told through the whimsical world of these curious little inhabitants.

• A Window to the Universe Where Little People Live

This interactive screen opens into another universe of tiny people. Using glowing stamps and light pens, visitors can draw lines and shapes that alter the behaviour of the inhabitants.

Each colour has a unique effect: Yellow repels; Blue speeds them up; Pink makes them bounce; Purple pulls them in; Green brings drawn creatures to life.

As people layer their drawings together, they collaboratively reshape the world, turning imagination into motion and shared creativity into an evolving universe.

Catching and Collecting Extinct Forest

Catching and Collecting Extinct Forest is an educational installation built around the concept of “catching, collecting, and observing”. It invites participants to explore an ancient forest teeming with long-extinct creatures, using their bodies and digital tools to make discoveries, capture animals, and deepen their curiosity through interactive observation.

As visitors move through the space, extinct animals appear to roam freely. Some may flee, others may pause and watch. Using a smartphone, participants launch an “Eye of Observation” at the creatures they see. If successful, the animal disappears from the physical environment and is added to their personal collection in the app.

Captured animals are stored in an illustrated digital encyclopedia that grows with each discovery. Repeated captures of the same species unlock more detailed information, encouraging exploration and study.

Participants can also use an “Observation Net”, casting it into space to create a virtual trap on the floor. Working together, visitors guide animals toward the net using their physical movement. Once an animal enters the trap, it’s collected - encouraging not only individual discovery but also collaborative learning.

Captured animals can be released back into the environment at any time, allowing for continued interaction and new opportunities to observe their behaviour.

Through active play and movement, this installation turns science and natural history into an engaging, evolving journey - where every step leads to a new encounter.

Open-Air

Open-Air is a collection of immersive installations that explore natural phenomena, human interaction, and the dynamic relationships between light, sound, and space. Together, these works invite visitors to engage physically and sensorially with natural forces, fostering a deeper understanding of the ever-changing world around us.

• Universe of Fire Particles Haunting the Sky and Earth

As visitors enter this work, a deep, black presence emerges, and flames within the space shift and transform, responding endlessly to their movements. Flames - phenomena of light and heat created by combustion - are visualised as three-dimensional flows of combusting gas, then flattened into a sensory experience through teamLab’s concept of super-subjective space.

With the Distributed Fire app, visitors can take flames home on their smartphones and pass them to others, spreading the artwork globally. This form of Distributed Art allows the work to exist beyond the physical space, living on within a network of people.

• Nursery Lamps in Spontaneous Order

Following the Floating Flower Garden, orchids continue to grow inside glowing nursery lamps, each with its own unique rhythm. Through a natural phenomenon called entrainment, these rhythms influence and gradually synchronise with each other and with the nearby resonating tea and sake, creating harmonious patterns of light and sound.

• Tea and Sake in Spontaneous Order – Dynamic Steady State Colour

When tea is poured or sake prepared, the liquids emit flickering light and sound rhythms that interact with the nursery lamps. This mutual influence forms a spontaneous, shared order that exists only while the drink remains. Observed from afar, the colours appear stable; up close, they continually shift, revealing a flowing sense of time within the light.

• Reversible Rotation in the Black Emptiness

This installation presents a pitch-black void filled with delicate, flowing trails that continuously form and fade, embodying themes of continuity and existence. The work features 'Sky Writing' - calligraphic strokes that rotate uniformly but can be perceived as turning either clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on the viewer’s perspective. This oscillation blurs the line between two- and three-dimensional space.

• Pocket Gardens in the City Cracks

Cracks are created in the urban fabric, connecting city spaces back to the earth. These cracks become pocket gardens, miniature natural landscapes nestled within the city. A continuous One-Linked Bench weaves organically through the gardens and buildings, integrating architecture and nature into a seamless, living environment.

• Pocket Forest Block

A self-sustaining forest where people cannot enter. Using mixed and dense planting of native tree species, this forest represents the land’s original natural vegetation. Designed to thrive indefinitely without human intervention, it embodies an enduring ecosystem.

• Dusk to Dawn / Forest, Wind and Light Paintings – Dusk to Dawn

Appearing after sunset, this work captures the forest’s dappled light, like sunlight filtering through leaves. The wind then gently reshapes these touches of light, animating the forest’s luminous patterns in a flowing display of colour and movement.

• Vortex Sea: Waves and Whirlpools

Inspired by traditional Japanese Seigaiha wave patterns - which symbolise infinite calm and eternal peace - this installation contrasts ordered and chaotic arrangements of rotating spheres painted with swirling vortices. These three-dimensional patterns are flattened within teamLab’s super-subjective space to create two distinct panels: one orderly, the other chaotic, exploring harmony and disorder through ancient motifs.

To deepen your journey, the official teamLab App offers detailed explanations of nearby installations, enriching your understanding and helping you engage more fully with each piece.

At teamLab Planets Tokyo, the experience extends beyond the artworks themselves. Visitors can enjoy unique dining moments where art and food merge seamlessly, whether sipping tea and sake among blooming orchids or savouring Michelin-recognised Vegan Ramen UZU within immersive art spaces.

Creativity continues at the Sketch Factory, where creatures you draw in 'Graffiti Nature' and 'Sketch Umwelt' World are brought to life as original items - tin badges, hand towels, T-shirts, tote bags, or papercraft. After ordering, your creature playfully appears inside the factory and enters the machine to become a one-of-a-kind souvenir.