Mercer Labs — Attraction in New York

Where do I begin. First let me say if you are going with kids over 13, my advice is to go at night due to the amount of little kids that are in there during the day. My daughter was dying to go here. We are from Philadelphia so I figured for her 17th birthday, lets take a trip to NY with my other kids and family. I bought 5 tickets spending just about $200 (Thank God for Groupon or else I would have spent well over $200). I booked for 3pm. You would think when you select a time slot, that there would be a limit on tickets for that particular time slot so that you can enjoy the experience. I was wrong. The initial room where they sit you down and make you put the slip covers on your shoes was packed to where we were standing against the wall. My daughter asked me if we could wait for the next group bc it was so many people so I asked the staff and found out that they dont honor time slots. You can go at any time as long as the tickets are used in that day. The first room as advertised had the swings (only 4) and they were being utilized by both adults and kids who didnt want to get off and let others enjoy it. There was in fact a line in the room for the swings and no staff member enforcing a time limit. We never got to use them. The next room was a relax room which indeed it was. Wall to Wall pads, beautiful carpet and pillows however, it was packed. People just laying around not moving so when we got there, we had to sit in the middle of the floor surrounded by everyone. We left that and proceeded through the tour of rooms with nothing but mirrors but who could enjoy anything with the amount of people being crammed into one small room. The most exciting, or so we thought, was the only interactive room in the entire place, the basement. We were told you could sit down and draw whatever you wanted and it will appear on the walls, there was a robotic arm where you could motion play a violin and the arm would do exactly what you do, and a ball pit. We get downstairs and it was nothing but little kids surrounding the drawing table, crawling all over it not letting anyone get near it, playing tag throughout while you are getting your shoes stepped on or pushed around by running kids. The ball pit was impossible to get to. All ages love the ball pit and there was a line of adults alike trying to get in there but we couldnt because the little kids wouldnt get out and the staff once again, wasnt enforcing a time limit so others could enjoy the experience. I have kids and love them dearly but there should be some sort of disclaimer on the site stating that the best time for people over a certain age is X time. All ages want to enjoy this experience and its nearly impossible. I wanted so bad to enjoy this since we drove 2 hours and this is all my daughter talked about for the last 2 months. Im extremely disappointed that this was our experience. We spent less then an hour inside, spent almost $200 dollars and walked out so angry. Again, if you are going with kids above 13 or other adults, DONT!!! Save your money and book Beat the Bomb 20 minutes away in Brooklyn which is what we did after to make up for this lackluster...

Ok, this is going to be a longer one so buckle up. The first time we tried to get tickets they were actually having some kind of private tequila event, but their website still let us book tickets and we only found out at the door. Thankfully they gave us a refund so we still got to go. However, the experience feels like a worse version of installations that do the same thing really well, like Wonderspaces across the US and TeamLabs in Japan. They have 16 exhibits but only four are worth seeing. The first is "the map", which is a room where they project famous artworks and other scenes onto the walls accompanied by an audio track. This is easily the best room, but when I tried to go back after seeing the rest, the security guard said that it was "too full" even though there were only half the amount of people there were when we first entered. They didn't make it very clear it was a linear experience. The room uses the same motif of an unspecified machine messing with a Greek statue that permeates the whole exhibit, but parts of it were obviously made by AI. The statue doesn't even move either. I'd expect that from my classmates, not in the middle of Manhattan! The second room worth visiting is the dragon, and is legitimately a worthwhile experience but still not enough to justify going here. It is a space of LEDs projected into an infinity room and it legitimately cool, although again Wonderspaces has a similar thing. There are two giant touchscreens that allow you to make your own art, and a ball pit with no context. And then the other exhibits feel a bit like scams. One of them was a virtual ball that you could push around, and is laggier than my 7 year old computer that had its last update 2 years ago. For a place that emphasizes technology, they could have put a lot more effort into their own. There is also a room that is filled with plastic flowers and some screens showing an AI generated video, a robot like those automatic sand tables but that can't reach a quarter of the sand with some kinetic sand to play with to make you feel like this place actually cared about you. Of course, it didn't matter to the robot at all. I won't describe all the other ones, but they were just as boring. The artist, Roy Nachum, places these steel replicas of famous chairs in the corridors and attributes them to himself because they have his signature on them or something. This place was designed for Instagram and the vapid doomscrollers, not for anyone with a solid interest in art. To add insult to injury, it was $50 per person. Two stars for the four good exhibits, but one star for the AI and the exorbitant price. Go to the...

I expected some robots, some actual technology — instead I got random pseudo-philosophical nonsense. The whole museum felt like a dream: extremely random, illogical, abstract, and surreal, with no real structure or direction.

I was at least hoping for something resembling real art, but the closest thing to that was probably the room with coloring pages. Or maybe, if you stretch it, the robot arm scraping in the sand — it was drawing and writing something, and might’ve had symbolic meaning. It was probably the only actually interesting thing in the whole place.

The first room featured a projection of altered artworks, some choreography, and weird wall patterns. It felt more like an intro than part of the exhibition — and then I realized it loops. Okay, maybe it’s just a stylistic intro. But the next room? Padded walls like a psych ward and random noises coming from speakers. The symbolism? Absolutely unclear.

Then came the coloring pages. No obvious message either, but at least vaguely art-related. After that, there was a screen where you type in your wish, and it appears inside a transparent capsule on-screen. Next to it were similar real capsules and pneumatic tubes behind glass. Why couldn’t I just write it on paper and insert it myself? No idea. I typed “That all humans died,” but the capsule that popped up didn’t even display the text I wrote. Disappointing.

Then there was a corridor with two touchscreens. One was black and let you draw on it — it felt like sketching on a rotating cylinder, which was kinda neat. The other showed Lady with an Ermine, and you could smudge it with your finger. Why? No clue.

Before that, there was a narrow mirrored room with hanging vertical blue LED strips — honestly, kind of cool visually.

The corridor led to a room with two ball pits. Yes, really. Then some sound control panels — most buttons and knobs were covered, only a few worked. A small screen showed a sine wave whose frequency increased as you pressed more buttons. Uh… okay?

There was also a robotic violin setup — a robot arm with a bow, and a motion sensor (looked like it was taken from an Xbox). If you moved your hands, the robot would play the violin. Genuinely cool, though I still have no clue what it was meant to express.

Finally, the robot arm writing in the sand — by far the most interesting and meaningful part of the whole place. Maybe a reference to machine consciousness? At least something you could interpret.

Yeah, I skipped a few rooms — trust me, you’re not missing much.

And the price? About the cost of a few burritos. Which would’ve probably had more meaning, and at least come with a...