Can You Trust Your Own Eyes? A Visit to Lisbon’s Museum of Illusions

Friday is the labor day holiday here in Portugal and a lot of places will be closed. Because of this, we did our weekly field trip today and visited the Museum of Illusions. The kids picked this field trip and they were super excited to go. It was a very small museum, but so well done. We had a great time and took so many fun pictures!

There was an abundance of illusions to explore. The first exhibits showed different size/shape illusions. When looking at the shapes, they look like they are different sizes, but then you can fit the same sized object onto each shape.

There was an exhibit that used mirrors that was super fun. One created the perception that you were at a round table with clones of yourself.

There was another one where we stood on opposite sides of sectioned mirrors. If you ever wondered what Dave and I would look like as a combined person, here you go. We laughed so hard at this one! Braxton said it was gross.

Ames Room

My favorite part of the museum was the Ames Room. This illusion was invented by American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. in 1946, and is said to be one of the most famous and disorienting optical illusions ever created. It’s a specially constructed room that appears to be a normal rectangular room, but is actually trapezoidal in shape. When two people stand in opposite corners, one looks tiny and one looks giant. This is because your brain defaults to assuming the room is a normal shape and adjusts the perceived size of the people instead. So fun!

Flip Photo Illusions

There were certain exhibits where we took pictures then rotated them 180 degrees to create the illusions. The kids pretended they were Spiderman for this one.

This one was supposed to look like you were flying like Superman through a tunnel, but I couldn’t really see it.

More Illusions and Testing our Brains

There was a room that created rainbow shadows.

And a place where it looked like your head was being served on a platter.

At the end there was a variety of brain games to try to figure out which we all enjoyed.

This was a really fun and engaging field trip! When we finished, Alexis said “Finally a museum that wasn’t boring.”