By Mat Smith From engadget

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.

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.

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

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.

(We reckon suitably inebriated adults would also find it pretty amazing.)

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