Grand Illusions
Tim Rowett's collection of optical toys and physics oddities, each demonstrated on camera by a man visibly delighted with all of it.
Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.
How to get the most from it
Grand Illusions sits in Optical Illusions under Weird, filed as rabbit hole.
- Open it when the evening is free. It has no natural stopping point.
- It works on a phone or a desktop, so open it on whatever is nearest.
- Turn the sound up or put headphones on — it needs audio.
- No account needed — you can start without signing up.
- Go in expecting something clever, weird and nostalgic.
About this category: Illusion collections and perception demos. The good ones keep working after you have been told exactly how they work.
Good for
- A long evening with nothing planned
- Being impressed by a clever idea
- Seeing the internet at its least explicable
- A trip back to the older internet
- Killing time on your phone
- Trying it with zero commitment
Grand Illusions: quick answers
Is Grand Illusions free?
Yes. Grand Illusions is free to use and needs no account.
Do I need an account to use Grand Illusions?
No. You can use Grand Illusions without signing up for anything.
Does Grand Illusions work on a phone?
Yes. Grand Illusions works on phones as well as desktop browsers.
Is Grand Illusions safe for work?
Yes, we file it as safe for work. It does need sound, so bring headphones.
How long does Grand Illusions take?
We file it as "Rabbit hole": Clear your evening. We warned you.
More in Optical Illusions
All 13 in Optical IllusionsA philosophy department's catalogue of illusions, each with what it is, what it demonstrates, and the argument still going about it.
- 10 min
Catalogue of impossible figures, ambiguous objects and Escher-adjacent architecture, kept up by one very devoted collector.
- 10 min
The official Escher archive: the impossible staircases, the tessellations, and his own notes on how he worked them out.
- 10 min
Official home of the autostereograms from every 1990s shopping centre, with a fresh one each week to go cross-eyed at.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Same mood: clever
All clever sitesChoose ten items in the right order and the cube blossoms into something absurd; choose the wrong order and it sulks at you.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Comic-strip teardowns of real product decisions, each one explaining the psychology behind why it did or did not work.
- 10 min
Look at a scatter plot and guess its correlation coefficient. A statistics lecture disguised as a slot machine, and it works.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Daily coverage of hardware projects that had no commercial reason to exist. Reliably the most inventive corner of the web.
Keep exploring
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