The mirror installed in the room does not show your face, unlike the real mirror. If you put on the glasses provided and look into the mirror, however, you will see only the glasses you are wearing in the place where you are supposed to be, and the background that is reversed just like what you expect to see in the mirror changes as you move back and forth or right and left.

“Unreflective Mirror” renders, in real time, a reverse 3D model image of the room interior, which is pre-set in the computer, according to the position of the glasses that the user is wearing. An infrared camera reads invisible reflections from the reflector mounted on the glasses in order to identify the position of the glasses. Additionally, the polarization filters on the glasses send different images to the right eye and left eye so that the images displayed in the mirror have a 3D appearance. In order to reproduce the function of the mirror with VR (virtual reality) technology in this work, the artist needed to make adjustments between the limits of human perception, the accuracy of reading the position of the glasses, and the limits of the stereoscopic system. Consequently, however, this necessity brought out a paradox that, although the media functions as a mirror to show and support the reality that we perceive, we must compensate “reality” for the gap that exists when the mirror—originally a transparent media—is replaced with opaque VR technology. This mirror unreflectively reacts so that you will question how you recognize things through the responses to your own senses.

Technically supported by: KAWASHIMA Takeshi