teamLab Planets is our favourite teamLab experience in Tokyo. Since the exhibits are meant to be fully experienced through touch and immersion, we see the need to take off our shoes as a plus point, not a minus. There is often a lot of online reluctance about the shoe part, but rest assured that it is an easy experience. There are clean changing rooms, and lockers for you to place your belongings, to allow you to truly experience the exhibits hassle-free.
In particular, we really love all the water-based experiences, because there's just a different sense of immersion when you are stepping into actual water, than just observing something from afar. There's also free towels at the end to dry your feet whenever you exit a water-based experience, so you don't have to worry about the hassle.
There's also a really cool exhibit where you enter into a large mirrored dome, where flowers are projected on the dome above, blooming and wilting with the passage of time. It's very serene to simply lay down on the floor, gazing up at the ceiling, and watching the endless cycle of life and death. And it's that ephemeral feeling that teamLab is really going for in this exhibition.
The exhibit with the hanging flowers is also really interesting because all of the flowers are actually live. It is definitely very pretty to look at, although the experience is somewhat spoiled by how slow the flowers take to rise and fall. In concept, the hanging garden is supposed to be like a maze where you can walk through and the flowers will lift up before you, and lower back down behind you. However, due to how slow the mechanism is, you often feel like you're just waiting for the flowers to move, or trying to trigger the lifting mechanism rather than actually being immersed in the exhibit. So much so that you might see people just crawling underneath the flowers without realising that they lift up in front of you.
The exhibit with the glowing metal rocks in the garden is also rather misleading. In the photos, it looks like a wide sprawling garden with hundreds of rocks, but in actuality, it's a rather small space with mirrors behind it to create that endless "illusion". It does come off much better in photos than it does in real life though. That being said, the projection of light onto these mirrored stones is still rather pretty, it's just, a bit of a gimmick, compared to the photos.
As a side note, some members of our team actually visited the teamLab office before, and some of the staff commented on how teamLab Planets is actually their favourite exhibition because it's a collection of many of their favourite art pieces from around the world. Even the exhibit with the hanging garden was something that ran as a temporary art piece elsewhere, but they liked it so much, that they ended up bringing it to Planets.
