Interconnected Reality

teamLab introduces Interconnected Reality (IR) technology, in which the real, physical space that surrounds people interacts with their individual digital devices. IR uses an individual's digital device, such as their smartphone, to make changes in the real space that can be seen with the naked eye, and these changes in the real space affect that person’s digital device in turn. teamLab has developed and patented a technology in which the changes you see in your smartphone’s camera also occur in the real world. In existing Augmented Reality (AR), the only thing that changes is the world as people see it on the screens of their digital devices. In IR, the world as people see it with the naked eye continues to be influenced and changed by the actions of people using their devices.

For instance, the Catching and Collecting Forest in teamLab Forest, which opened in Fukuoka in July of 2020, allows visitors to participate in the artwork using the IR Catching and Collecting Forest App. If you look at an animal on the wall in the real space with the app’s camera, and swipe to shoot a study arrow at the wall, the arrow will fly in real space to the spot you are looking at through the camera. When the study arrow hits and captures an animal, it disappears from the real space and enters your smartphone. When the captured animal is thrown back onto the wall as seen through the app’s camera, it is freed from the smartphone, returned to its location in the real world (the wall), and begins to walk through the physical space again.

In future societies, cities and other real spaces will become digital. We believe that IR technology will allow individual digital devices and cities to affect each other, and that individual people will have the ability to create changes in the cities around them.