Awesome Interactive

This amazing and colorful accent light has a structure made up of full-color LED light strips, set into a cube of one-way mirrored acrylic panels. The result is the coolest infinity lamp we’ve ever seen. It works with a companion mobile app to adjust its lighting effects and has a sound-reactive mode. Comes in 10″ and 15″ sizes.

Artist Andreas Hönigschmid designed these wonderful interactive playthings which can each flex and fold into more than 70 different shapes thanks to their hidden magnets. The 3″ cubes come in six color schemes, and you can connect multiples to create more complex shapes.

Artist Love Hultén is a master at creating interactive electronic works inspired by retro technology. While the MCP Cassette Player isn’t as complex as say, his VOC-25 synthesizer, it’s still a fun piece. It’s basically a tape player that looks like a wind-up toy and lets its user control the tape’s playback speed with analog control.

Sand plotters are machines that moves a magnet and a ball bearing to draw geometric patterns in the sand. These machines usually move pretty slowly. On the other hand, Mark Rehorst’s large version draws very quickly, hypnotizing the cat who sits on the glass above it.

This interactive online plaything uses a recurrent neural network to produce loops of music that you can influence by moving around and clicking on objects in its scene. Once you’ve created a sound you like, you can share a link to your tune. Find out more details about the project here.

Russian art collective TUNDRA teamed up with display company HOLO ONE to create this hypnotic artwork. It features a series of modular, scalable persistence of vision screens which display moving patterns that highlight and reflect the space in which they are installed. The piece made its debut in Shanghai, China in July 2020.

Material Immaterial Studio presents a unique piece of interactive tabletop art. Cast from concrete, the diminutive Factory features design elements of Brutalist industrial architecture and incorporates a rolling ball maze. Just roll the tiny steel bearings from its tower, and enjoy the show! Measures 8.07″ W x 4.33″ D x 6.29″ H.

When looking at a 2D map of the world, it’s really hard to understand how big countries really are. For instance, the U.S., Australia, and Europe are similarly sized. Developed by James Talmage and Damon Maneice, The True Size Of… lets you drag countries on top of each other to better visualize their relative sizes.

This playful interactive desktop artwork transforms between a pine cone shape and a helix structure depending on the direction you spin it. There’s also a wooden “executive version” because bosses don’t like colors, and like to spend twice as much money.

Designers Graham Plumb and Stephen Braitsch collaborated on this amazing mechanical display that uses a series of 180 magnets to write text in a pool of ferrofluid. They built 10 custom machines which are programmed to raise and lower magnets, creating the segmented letters in the oily fluid.

Designer and maker Love Hultén is best known for his retro-inspired video game and computer builds. But this one is quite different – an electromechanical drum machine that plays rhythms using a MIDI sequencer. Each of its components is modular, so it can be reconfigured to create unique audio sculptures.

Artist Samer Dabra programmed Evil Mad Scientist’s AxiDraw v3 plotter to take photographic images and reinterpret them as twisty, turny, abstract line art. By overlaying CMYK inks, the images have an appearance of being in full color. More images on Instagram.

Artist and designer Daniel DeBruin created this interactive thrill ride, which gives its rider some control over their destiny by using biometric feedback to adjust the speed at which it flings them around. The 7-meter-tall ride uses sensors to measure heart rate, muscle tension, body temperature, as well as orientation and gravity.

Artist Parker Heyl created this ingeniously simple but visually stunning installation work. Inspired by Jacob’s Ladder toys, it mechanically flips dozens of them with wood on one side and mirrors on the other to reflect colorful, ever-changing imagery. More here.

Breakfast created this incredible work of kinetic art that uses spools of thread to display images. It has 6400 individual spools, each of which can rotate between 36 different colors to display a single pixel. The trick is that the spools actually are loaded with a long multi-color belt, rather than individual threads.

Created by Raven Kwok for Shanghai’s TODTOWN, time++ is a computer generative artwork which displays the passage of time in a unique way. Particles appear on its screens representing the current second, and then migrate into position to display the hours and minutes as giant digits. Can we please have this as a screensaver?