Open Horizons, Colliding Bodies: Adaptive Lure Agents in a Glass Maze

Why build yet another virtual reality artwork when VR already promises boundless exploration? We began with a blunt provocation: make the body feel the gap between virtual promise and material fact. Our installation embeds a fully occlusive headset inside a transparent glass maze so constraint remains visible. An adaptive reinforcement-learning (RL) lure, treated as a performing partner—edits salience with gentle invitations rather than commands. Across over ten exhibitions (2017–2025), the piece evolved from onlooker voyeurism to a choreography of agency among audience, machine-performer, and artist-architect. By partially publicizing policy intent on the floor, projections, and rail, what is usually hidden as seamless UX becomes dramatically legible; guidance is experienced as both bodily and social, with collisions reading as shared mischief more than punishment. We contribute an art-led, large-scale architecture that couples predictive models with embodied interaction while retaining ambiguity: visible constraint (glass), public policy signals (floor/projections/rail), and an RL lure that persuades by staging opportunity. Drawing on in-exhibition observations, we report regularities that motivate lightweight, gallery-feasible evaluations without altering the artwork, thereby paving the way for systematic study. More broadly, the work reframes “good guidance” not only as seamlessness but as strategic visibility, an ethico-aesthetic stance on when power should be allowed to show, and the autonomy we trade when an algorithm anticipates our limits.