Seeing Illusions at the Twist Museum

After exploring the Paradox Museum and having a fantastic time, we decided to check out the Twist Museum, as it’s meant to be similar. The Twist Museum is in central London, where you enter and explore a bunch of illusions, learning how they work and taking photographs of what you discover. This venue did have more illusions technically, but it felt like less were interactive and the layouts themselves were also a little clustered and crowded.

When we arrived, we realized that they weren’t really following ticketed times, so the place was extremely busy. We did nap a free locker, store our belongings, and then started walking around. The first room we went into was actually very impressive; it was a color room where everything that entered and everything in it looked yellow and bizarre, due to the lighting. On rotation, a normal light would shine at the umbrellas on the wall, showing the true color everything was. It’s very unique and interesting to see! From there, we started to see a bunch of art on the walls.

All of these little wall squares were different illusions, which added up to being far more illusions than we’ve every seen somewhere before. Many of them were quick to look at and had little explanations about how the illusion worked and why. There were tons of people here, so it was a bit hard to really get into the right place for these, but we did have a fun time explaining if they “worked” for each of us and if they didn’t. Quite a few of the hanging arty pieces also had interactions – to show you the illusion better, which we all enjoyed playing around with.

The Twist Museum had a big kaleidoscope room, which was honestly my favorite part of the place. You can stick your head in a bunch of different mirror zones, seeing another person at the other side! These felt very unique to this museum, and there were a bunch of different types. There was also a big kaleidoscope room that you can walk into, however, the light walls weren’t working when we went in, so we stuck with these smaller kaleidoscopes. This room was a sort of free for all, with kids running around and having a lot of fun.

This room also had a few other illusions; the mirror with slits in it being one that we’ve seen before, but found it much easier here as we could sit for it. There was also a room that had an interactive digital space, where you could dance in a camera and see yourself. There were circus mirrors as well – just a lot of stuff to play around with, if that makes sense! We them moved into more perspective based art, looking at different images and structures from a different point of view to see what they were. There was also a very colorful topsy-turby room at the Twist Museum, which felt really fun to walk in!

We ended up seeing some of the same perspective illusions we’ve previously seen, but they were still so much fun! We also all got turned into a 3D Scan of ourselves, which spun in the Twist Museum for quite some time. There was another, new room, which had both a colored side and a black and white side, with a mirror to take some interesting photos in, mixing the perspectives. There were more hallways with art as well, many of which were digital towards the end, so that you could tap buttons to change what was going on and change the illusion. These interactions were interesting and we quite enjoyed them, though there was quite a bit of waiting around to do anything due to how busy it was overall.

You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!