3D-Shadows
Shadows gain depth. Illuminated with red and green light, a tetrahedron casts a red and a green shadow on the screen. Viewed through glasses with red and…
Additive Color Mixing
Mixing light colors. Play with red, green, and blue light, and with their brightness. When overlapped and adjusted optimally, red, green, and blue produce…
After Image
Seeing the void. A powerful flash of light triggers a photochemical process on our retina. This process lasts longer than the brief light flash that…
Alike and unalike
The illusion of inequality. Two identical wooden arcs lie side by side. The inner one appears larger, but it isn’t. For circular arcs, the outer edge is…
Ambiguous Figures
Clearly ambiguous. One object, two forms: “Necker cubes” belong to the category of ambiguously perceivable objects. Perceiving spatial dimensions and depth:…
Banana
If you place a blue filter exactly on the yellow banana, the banana appears green - logical, isn't it? A larger blue filter that also covers the white…
Benham's Disc
Benham’s disks: seeing colors where there are none. The disks display patterns with black and white shapes. When these disks rotate, we perceive colors. When…
Blind Spot
Wasn’t there an orange? Stare at the apple with one eye and slowly bring it closer to your face. At a certain distance, the orange beside the apple seems to…
Blood Vessels of the Eye
Recognizing what we normally never see. In front of (not behind) the retina of our eye, there is a network of blood vessels. We don’t see it. Our brain…
Changing Sides
A wire cube rotates in front of a mirror. If you squint one eye and fix a front corner of the wire cube, you see a certain direction of rotation. If you now…
Circular Deformations
Patterns come to life. Ovals form around stationary circles. Funnels emerge, cones rise. Curved lines perform a serpentine dance. Images that, when observed…
Geometric shapes come to life. What we think we see in the shapes of spinning discs! Ovals wrapping around stationary circles. Cones wobbling in a…
Coarse or Fine
Texture and perception. One hand strokes coarse sandpaper. The other hand strokes fine sandpaper. Then both hands simultaneously stroke sandpaper with medium…
Cold Test
Four degrees – only relatively cold. Touch the metal rods, please. Yes, they’re really cold. Almost painful. How painful is this brief contact? This…
Color Contrast
How blue blue can be. Two color squares, one lighter, one darker. Are we sure? As different as we perceive them, they actually share the same color. We…
Colour Reversal
A red tree turns entirely green. Why does the tree change its color? If we fix our gaze on an image long enough, the color receptors (cones) in our eyes lose…
Coloured Shadows
Three lights for shadows in six colors. Red. Green. Blue. Three lamps illuminate the white background. On it, we see six shadows of different colors: a…
Corpuscles of the Eye
Checking the pulse! Red blood cells absorb blue light particularly well. When we look into a blue light source, we see pulsating dots. A whole network of…
Crooked Tiles
Cafe Wall Illusion: the tile deception. These parallel lines really seem tilted! The black and white squares can be arranged in stripes or offset into a…
Delayed Viewing
Acting and seeing with a time delay. Catching fish with a fishing line: normally, it’s simple enough, as the magnet on the line is easy to guide. But it gets…
Depth Enhancer
Perceiving distances differently. The Tiefenverstärker (depth amplifier) artificially increases the distance between our eyes—from an average of 65 mm (in…
Dialog in the Vase
Vase with two faces. At some point, the image flips: first, it’s a vase. It rotates. Wait! There are two faces. Two people talking to each other. Two…
Die gelbe Toilette - Herren
Colors from Nowhere Under yellow light, the walls appear colorless. After a minute, normal lighting briefly turns on, revealing the vivid colors on the…
Different Discs
Estimating and weighing. Visual context and the expectations it creates: wood is lighter than metal, obviously. Or is it? What weight do we expect when…
Distorted Room (Ames Room)
Little one grows tall. An absolutely ordinary room, at least when viewed through the peephole. But wait, the little brother grows taller than the big sister…
Edges communicate Information
Dot, white, somewhat mysterious. Two gray panels, each with a cross. To the right, a white area: In one case, the area is sharply defined against the gray…
Escher’s endless Staircase
Ascending downwards. Luckily, this infinite staircase doesn’t exist in our world. It leads upwards endlessly, without ever reaching a top. Similarly, its path…
Eye Viewer
Pupils: an astonishing reaction. One eye dazzled, two pupils respond. The pupil’s reaction to light is an involuntary reflex. To some extent, our retina can…
Face Wipe
Swipe – and the face is gone. A single movement of the hand is enough for a face to disappear, partially or completely. The installation “Erase-A-Face” plays…
Fantascope
Forerunner of modern cinema. Phenakistes = deceiver: two printed disks with radial slits create fantastic “films.” This happens when they are rotated in…
Farbenwechsel - Damen
Hidden Images Each toilet cubicle is alternately illuminated with pure red, yellow, and blue light. Images on the walls become visible only under a specific…
Feeling current
How strong is the effect of electricity? Here you can feel the sensation of electric current. To do this, you place two fingers on two contacts and increase…
Feeling Eyes
Sometimes round, sometimes oval. With eyes closed and explored by touch, the bowl feels oval. Viewed through the lens and touched, it appears – depending on…
Feeling for Weight
Form influences expectation. Size-weight illusion: the upper of two stacked boxes appears heavier than both boxes combined. Estimating weight and lifting: in…
Floating Rings
Magical: Three rings floating in perfect balance. That they appear to balance like spinning coins is an illusion. The rings are firmly connected to one…
Fragrance Wheel of Fortune
Scent and emotion: what effect does each smell have? Spin the wheel and smell when it stops. As a "prize," pleasant or unpleasant scents. Delighted or…
Frozen Hand
Freeze! The right hand moves to the left – and then moves back. And yet, it remains still. The stroboscopic flash always illuminates the hand in the same…
Full body involvement
Perceive quickly and react immediately with coordinated, skillful movements. Developed as a piece of sports equipment, “Full Body Involvement” promotes…
Gentle Hands
Fine, yet coarse mesh. Perceiving structures: one hand strokes a coarse grid. The other hand strokes a fine mesh. Then both hands simultaneously stroke a grid…
Ghost Images
"Triple Eye Lightsticks" Twelve multicolored, vertically arranged LED rods flicker. As the gaze slowly sweeps from left to right, images, text, and patterns…
Half Shadow
Goethe’s shadow. White lamp on, red lamp on as well: the hand casts a red and a green shadow! We see colors that aren’t actually there. How can that be? The…
Hermann Grid and Scintillating Grid with Variants
A static image that flickers. Viewed from a certain distance, with a steady gaze, these images flicker. They scintillate. The Hermann grid seen up close: at…
Hollow Head
Only has eyes for you. One step to the left, three to the right, stretch upward a little, bend down: there’s no escape. Those eyes follow you…
Hot - Cold
Can something be hot and cold at the same time? The copper coil is warm on one side and cold on the other. Our temperature receptors detect this immediately…
I
The world in your head. A room free of distractions, without contrasts or contours: the entire field of vision is exposed to a single constant, homogeneous…
I You Us
Five faces – one world. A stimulating exploration of themes such as freedom, feelings of belonging, or emotions like shyness or embarrassment: who will you…
Impossible Nuts
A perfectly straight pencil that wiggles. When the brain resists what the eye sees: it seems impossible for the pencil to move through the two nuts in such a…
Inclined Chess
Big and bulky for some – small and slim for others. A completely messed-up chess set, right? Agreed? Almost. The chessboard is perfectly level. The pieces…
Klankkaatser
Hello world? Shaped like a light bulb, resembling a spacecraft capsule: welcome to the Klankkaatser! Is anyone there? The sound waves don’t drift into space;…
Light Deformation
"Successioni luminose" – physics turned upside down. Light deforms metal: physical laws are seemingly – and visibly – turned on their head here. A white…
Look in the Clouds
Clouds drift by – shapes emerge. The phenomenon of pareidolia: when watching the drifting clouds on the large screen for a while, we see animals, objects, and…
Magic Wand
Persistence of vision. Light is actually invisible. If it doesn’t hit our eyes directly, we can’t see it. Without a screen, a slide projection isn’t very…
Make two into one
A new look at familiar faces. Three of you are sitting at a table. One person is looking into two mirrors. With the right eye, they see the person sitting to…
Mal kleiner, mal grösser - Herren
Eye-Catcher Focus on the center of the spiral for twenty seconds. Then look at your palm. It will appear to shrink and expand. Location: 1st floor, staircase…
Model Eyeball
Nearsighted/farsighted: it makes a difference. We can see objects clearly both up close and far away. This is because our eye muscles can change the shape of…
Moving Gray Areas
Remaining still while moving, turning, shrinking, growing. They move, these gray figures – yet they stay in the same place. Gray figures, thinly outlined in…
Moving Stripes
Until the eye wobbles… If the exposure time is too long, the camera cannot capture fast movements. Similarly, the image is blurry if we hold the eye still.…
Never-Ending Scale
When the scale descends infinitely… Listen closely, press a key, then the next – and compare. At first glance, identifying the highest note seems easy. Which…
Pseudoscope
In reality … What if we viewed the world with an eye distance of 36 cm – instead of the usual 6 cm – and if the information intended for the left eye were…
Pulfrich Phenomena
This pendulum circles. Through the optics, this pendulum swings in an elliptical path. With a gray filter in front of the other eye, its direction changes.…
Pulfrich Phenomenon
Simple trick, astonishing effect. An object is swinging. Observed with a dark filter in front of one eye: the swinging object now moves along a circular…
Rainbow Smileys
From black and white to a burst of colors. Disks with black-and-white patterns, illuminated by a white lamp. But this lamp has a trick up its sleeve! It…
Reaction Quickness
React quickly to different stimuli! See - hear - feel: Which stimulus will make you press the button the fastest?
Reversed Perspective
Art gallery reveals contradictions. This three-dimensional spatial sculpture completely overturns our visual habits. It flips the space by presenting elements…
Rising or Falling
Interpreting signals of position and balance. When the platform lowers and the column elongates: how does the brain interpret the messages from tactile cells…
Rotating Tunnel
Hold on! Walking on solid ground, like on a swaying ship. Standing stable, walking upright on flat ground: nothing could be easier. Or is it? The rotating…
Scintillating Screen & Hermann Grid
Why TV hosts don’t wear patterned shirts. Patterns appear within the pattern. At least when observed for a while. Dark lines emerge, then start flickering,…
Sculptures in stroboscopic light
« BLOOM Revelation » and « BLOOM Accordance ». Sculptures come alive: single images, shown in rapid succession, are combined by our brain into a seamless…
Seelenspiegel
Colorful light is brought to life by your imagination. The interaction of light with various glass objects and filters creates fascinating color patterns on a…
Sliding Gray Step
Everything in the gray zone. Light and dark are not absolute values for our perception. Because we do not perceive the gray of the stripes in isolation, but…
Sloping Room
And the ball rolls – uphill. Step right in! Are you standing steady? A normal room with normal furniture, and yet it creates a strange feeling. The reason is…
Slow Blue
Slow Blue. Three light points move at exactly the same speed. Yet, the blue point appears to lag behind the others. The effect is stronger or weaker depending…
Smell Habituation
Even strong scents fade eventually. In a mixture of a strong and a weak scent, we only smell the strong one – the dominant scent. If we smell the strong scent…
Squaring the Circle
Everything always has two sides. From one side, it looks like a square; from the other, a circle. It’s all a matter of viewpoint and perspective. The…
Squirming Palm
Rotating pattern and its afterimage. Stare at the rotating dot pattern for a while, then look at the palm of your hand: it now seems to rotate too – but in…
Street Lamps
At night, all cats are gray! A colorful card (under normal light): under monochromatic orange light, it loses its colors. Illuminated by the yellow light of a…
The Eyes help you lift
This exhibit is about the conflict between the visual situation and what I expect from it, how the weights feel, and the feeling when I actually lift the…
The finest difference
How fine is your dexterity? Very fine: experience how this is defined for you with this exhibit. You can feel when something sticks out by ten millimeters.…
The Odours of Things
Seeing, smelling, evaluating. Cheese? Pleasant. Smelly socks? Unpleasant! Correct – but not here. Visual context strongly influences how smells are perceived.
The separated Self
Right hand: the left hand. Left hand: the right hand. A glance from the right side into the mirror: Yes, that's the left hand. You move your left hand: but it…
Three Chairs
A different perspective: spatial perception. Looking through the peephole reveals three chairs. Only one is built as we would expect. A side view into the…
Three-dimensional Projection
3D – the cinema is made by the brain. From red and green shadows, plastic, three-dimensional objects emerge. Viewed through glasses with red and green…
Touch the Spring!
Or maybe not? It appears incredibly real: a three-dimensional image – here a feather – reflected by a spherical mirror. Impossible to touch.
Touching the Knife (or not)
Ouch! A Swiss army knife floats freely in the air. Appearance and reality: no one gets cut by this knife. Reaching for it ends in thin air. What we see is…
Trapezoidal Window
Half a turn forward, half a turn back. A window, drawn in perspective, thus takes on a trapezoidal shape. Suspended by a nylon thread, it rotates on its own…
Tricky Curves
Reorienting in space. In us, vision and movement are closely interconnected: we see where things are and simultaneously sense where our body is in space.…
Unsicherer Boden - Damen
Mountain Ridges and Valley Floors. The entire floor is covered with a film depicting dips and bumps. This creates the illusion of a completely wavy surface,…
Unsicherer Boden - Herren
Waterfall Effect (Rotating Spirals)
Illusory motion, its direction, and afterimages. As the disc spins, the spiral patterns seem to turn inside out. Then, after focusing on the patterns for a…
Welcome to Sector K… ?
This is how we read, this is how we understand written text. A letter is missing, the word is misspelled – and yet, we immediately understand what is…
Wheel of Life
Does our brain work like a film camera? Similar to a flipbook, an endless film plays here. The twelve tiny light dots are the main actors. Despite this sparse…
Wide of the Mark
Throwing a ball through a ring: easy. Even with these glasses? The glasses shift the field of vision. The ball is now likely to miss its target. By…
Wire Mesh Sculpture
Movement illusion. With a poetic touch, this artwork depicts movement illusions that underlie film and television technology. The wire figures differ only…
«Poppier»
When walls wobble. Reversed perspective: it turns our visual habits upside down. The three-dimensional sculptural painting “Poppier” practically flips spaces…
Afterimage
A flash of light prints a lingering image in your eye. After looking at something bright, such as a lamp or a camera flash, you may continue to see an image of…
Ambiguous Cube
Strange things can happen when your brain gets confused. Some objects or figures are “ambiguous,” providing visual input that your brain can interpret in more…
To see or not to see. The eye’s retina receives and reacts to incoming light and sends signals to the brain, allowing you to see. One part of the retina,…
Cold Metal
"Cold" metal and "warm" wood may be the same temperature. Your hand isn't always a good thermometer. When you touch a variety of materials, some will seem…
A colored object may look different against different-colored backgrounds. In this investigation, you'll discover how colors seem to change when you place them…
Disappearing Act
If you want to stay hidden, you’d better stay still. Some animals blend in with their surroundings so well that they’re nearly impossible to see. Only when…
Groovy Sounds
Build a paper-pencil-pin phonograph. In this classic activity, make a record player out of simple materials and listen to your favorite vinyl LP—no outlet…
Head Harp
Learn a little string theory. Wrap a string around your head and pluck it to play music.
Hole In Your Hand
What happened to your whole hand? You have two eyes, yet you see only one image of your environment. If your eyes receive conflicting information, what does…
Moire Patterns
Imperfect alignment can lead to interesting patterns. When you look through one chain-link fence at another, you sometimes see a pattern of light and dark…
Sound Bite
Tune in to tunes with your teeth. When you listen to a radio or music player, you normally hear the sound coming from the speaker or headphones. But sound…
Your Sense of Taste
Discover the real taste of candy. Think of some of your favorite tastes: savory Thanksgiving turkey, buttery mashed potatoes, tangy cranberry sauce, and warmly…
CakeLab – function of baking ingredients
“Pat-a-cake pat-a-cake, baker’s man. Bake me a cake as fast as you can…” This popular nursery rhyme might be one way to bake a cake. But there are also other…
Chocolate atelier – The secret of Swiss Chocolate
Cocoa beans were already consumed at the time of the Aztecs and the Mayas, and chocolate has remained a bestseller for centuries. And it is equally clear that…
Cold, colder, shock freezing – ice cream in three minutes
Need an ice cream? We only use natural ingredients and freeze them with liquid nitrogen (minus 196 °C!) in no time to a fruity delicacy. Who can say no to a…
Kalt, kälter, schockfrosten - inklusiv
Ein Glace gefällig? Wir verwenden nur natürliche Zutaten und frosten diese mit flüssigem Stickstoff (minus 196 °C!) in Nullkommanix zu einer fruchtigen…
Listen up! - Directional listening
The cat lies on the couch, eyes closed. Only the ears move slightly and turn in the direction from which they perceive a sound. Why can some creatures move…
Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami – PCR
Do we all really taste the same thing when we bite into a hot dog? And if not, what role do our genes play? PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. This is a…
What do you see? – Function of the eye
We make eyes at someone, but keep an eye on others. We can turn a blind eye and sometimes get away with just a black eye. But the myriad of idiomatic…
Where am I? – Bioelectric orientation
Migratory birds find their way south by means of magnetoreception, bats create an “aural picture” of their surroundings by means of echolocation and certain…
Acoustics
Aggregate states
Algorithms
Animals, plants, habitats
Atomic and quantum physics
Atomic structure
Automats
Biology
Buoyancy
Chaos
Characteristics of life
Chemical Reactions
Chemistry
Colors
Computer science
Cryptology
Currents
Data and information
Design elements
Earth sciences
Electricity
Electricity and energy
Electricity and magnetism
Elektromagnetismus
