Intro
Twist Museum opened on Oxford Street in 2022 as London's home of illusion: 80 exhibits built on the idea that reality is a thing your brain assembles rather than a thing you receive. We were in the room while it was still an idea, and we went on to design and build six of its exhibits.
Every one of them is a different answer to the same engineering question: how do you make a perceptual trick hold up when hundreds of people a day walk into it from any angle they like, and it has to run all day, every day, without a technician standing behind it.
The exhibits
Volumetric light
Light given three dimensions. Rather than surfaces that are lit, the piece treats the beam itself as the material, building forms that sit in the air of the room and move through a slow, unhurried narrative.
We wrote the score alongside it, so the music and the geometry are composed as one thing rather than one laid over the other.
Built with TouchDesigner. Original score by Worksofar.
Kaleidoscope Room
The room reacts and refracts to your presence. Visitors are tracked as they move, and the kaleidoscope carries them through journeys that begin as flat, two-dimensional pattern and open out into fully dimensional worlds. Two real-time engines run together, TouchDesigner handling the live augmentation and Unreal rendering the worlds it opens into. The audio is not a playback track: it is generated live in Ableton Live, responding to what the room is doing at that moment.
Built with TouchDesigner, Unreal Engine and Ableton Live.
Magic Mirrors
Each mirror takes the visitor's live image and rebuilds it. Two pieces, two entirely different visual treatments, so the museum gets two distinct moments out of one idea rather than the same effect twice.
Both run at full frame rate on a live camera feed, which is the hard part: any latency and the illusion that you are looking at yourself collapses.
Built with TouchDesigner and Notch.
Infinity Mirror Room
An enclosed mirrored volume with thousands of individually addressable LEDs mapped through its interior, so effects can be composed in the three-dimensional space of the room rather than in the two dimensions of the surfaces. Paired with an original score written for the piece.
Built with TouchDesigner. Original score by Worksofar.
Einstein shadow sculpture
A shadow illusion, designed and fabricated in-house by us. An Einstein quote stands proud of the wall as three-dimensional lettering. Light from below passes through and around the letters, and the shadow they throw onto the wall above resolves into a portrait of Einstein himself. Every letter's depth, angle and profile is derived from the shadow it has to cast, which means the sculpture is legible as text and as image at the same time, from a single fixed source of light.
Designed, engineered and fabricated by Worksofar.
Vortex Room
Printed graphics, mapped to the geometry of the room with enough precision that the walls appear to fall away into an endless vortex. No screens, no projection, no power.
Just the mathematics of a single viewpoint, worked out in advance and printed.
Design and mapping by Worksofar.
Client
Twist Museum, London
Our role
Concept-stage consultation, exhibit design, creative technology, original music, fabrication, custom electronics fabrication
Opened
2022, 248 Oxford Street
Built with
TouchDesigner, Unreal Engine, Notch, Ableton Live
