Another Realm
Standing alone in a forest this tripped out portal beckons to all to explore the other side. Another Realm combines an infinity mirror with projection mapping to make psychedelic tiled patterns that drift deep into the darkness of somewhere else. Debuting at the 2025 Autumn Lights show in Oakland, CA this brainchild of Tony Redwolf asked thousands to look beyond and they did.
Tech Stuff
There the main component of the fantastical illusion are the mirrors. Specifically, Another Realm uses a triangular prism in an infinity mirror configuration and this is what gives the piece its kaleidoscope effect (you see, kaleidoscopes also use triangular prisms). The magic happens inside the prism where light bounces all around creating repeating images that seem to go on forever. To provide visibility to the inside of the prism, one side of the prism is a ‘one way mirror’ – one of those mirrors you can only see as a mirror from a particular side.
A projector shines directly inside the prism onto a little triangle cut out on the floor and the mirrors inside the prism then do the rest of the work and you see psychedelic animated patterns. The visuals themselves are a special kind of graphics program called a shader, this is a program specifically for a GPU that calculates the color values for each pixel individually. We then use projection mapping software called HeavyM which allows us to carefully shape the shader output to the triangle which really allows the image inside the mirrors to pop. Each shader we use is provided by the open source community. Another Realm has several scenes which change automatically.
