Get your cameras ready. After successful openings in 13 cities around the world, Canada’s first Museum of Illusions has opened up in Toronto — and its aim is to boggle your mind.
“In the Ames Room, you’ll experience the dwarf effect, and the opposite, too. It’s a trapezoidal room, so depending on where you stand, you will either seem really tiny or gigantic,” says Katarina Radman, director of marketing for Toronto’s Museum of Illusions.
Some rooms use angles and slanted surfaces to distort perspective. Others use holograms. Think of it as a 4,700-square-foot funhouse just steps away from the St. Lawrence Market.
The infinity room is a fan favourite. Mirror upon mirror built into a hexagon shape gives the illusion the room goes on forever — you’ll be hard-pressed to find your way out.
This is a 21st-century, family friendly museum where visitors are encouraged to touch and feel, and in many ways, become part of the exhibits.
“Take a photo from here and flip it upside down and you’ll look like you’re floating on the ceiling,” Radman says about the “Reversed Room.”
While the venue is an Instagrammer’s dream, organizers stress its value is “edutainment” because of the mathematical, scientific and psychological elements presented in the space.
Visitors learn about how the brain makes sense of mixed messages when challenged with complex visual and special awareness scenarios. There are more than 80 exhibits presented.
Hold on tight when you walk into the “vortex,” where the challenge is to remain upright because it feels as if the bridge is swaying, when in fact it’s the walls which are spinning.
Open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., the Museum of Illusions is the first permanent tourist attraction to open in Toronto since Ripley’s Aquarium.