London company Stufish laid out a spectacularly trippy experience for visitors to this year's One Giant Leap technology conference in Saudi Arabia, in which visitors could walk through a colossal kaleidoscope tunnel, surrounded by wild LED visuals.
The 40-m (131-ft) tunnel measured 6 m (19.7 ft) tall and 3 m (9.8 ft) wide, although its clever use of seamless, warpless mirrors makes the space look cylindrical as huge LED panels under the floor and in the wall tiles push out a series of slowly expanding, wildly psychedelic geometric designs, interspersed with visuals from a range of different environments "from the bottom of the sea to the sky and stars."
Its size doesn't win it the "world's largest kaleidoscope" title outright – a converted silo in New York State has a larger diameter, and another exhibition piece built for the 2005 Aichi Expo in Japan featured a tube 47 m (154 ft) long. Both of these, however, were vertically oriented. The Stufish design is the biggest kaleidoscope ever built for people to actually walk through.
Stufish says designing a 40-m-long mirror without any seams or warping wasn't the only challenge – to maintain the illusion of infinite space, the team had to design triangular entry and exit portals at either end that wouldn't disrupt the reflections.
Unfortunately the conference has wrapped up so you won't be able to walk through the kaleidoscope tunnel yourself, but you can check out the effect in the video below.
Source: Stufish
