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Look at pictures through different color filters and you'll see them in a new way. People have used color filters in beautiful photography or sending secret messages.

In this outdoor activity, learners search for the warmest and coolest, windiest and calmest, wettest and driest, and brightest and darkest spots in an area.

In this outdoor activity, learners use only their senses to to find the extremes of several environmental variables or physical factors: wind, temperature, light, slope and moisture.

This science activity demonstrates the dominant eye phenomena. What does your brain do when it sees two images that conflict?

In this outdoor, winter activity, learners find living green plants under the snow and determine the light and temperature conditions around the plants.

In this simple activity, learners investigate refraction by placing a picture of an arrow behind a glass of water.

Do you have a hard time matching paint swatches with your furniture? When you consider human perception, color is context dependent.

In this activity about color, learners get to explore the process of chromatography. Right before their eyes, they can watch ordinary green and black ink turn into a literal rainbow of colors.

In this activity, learners control the (apparent) size of a hole with their brain.

In this activity, learners explore how and why rainbows form by creating rainbows in a variety of ways using simple materials. Learners create rainbows indoors and outdoors.

Create 3D glasses and use them to explore color, light and optics. Fool your brain into 'seeing' three dimensions on a flat surface!

In this optics activity, learners use paint thinner to make a small jar seem to disappear inside a larger jar.

In this optics activity, learners use everyday materials to make a color wheel. When learners spin the wheel like a top, they will be surprised to see all the colors mixing together to appear white.

Make a big canvas of iridescent color with pvc pipe! In this Exploratorium Science Snack, you'll need to cut and assemble some PVC pipe, but the pay-off, the soap-bubble canvas, is big.

In this optics activity, learners discover how they can make glass objects "disappear." Learners submerge glass objects like stirring rods into a beaker of Wesson™ oil to explore how the principles of

In this demonstration (18th on the page), learners conduct a simple test to explore how the cornea refracts light, which is further bent by the eye lens through a process known as accommodation.

How can you make one shade of gray look like two? By putting it against two different color backgrounds! This activity allows learners to perform this sleight of hand very easily.

In this activity, learners create a "mini sky" in a glass of water in a dark room.

In this optics activity, learners discover that when they rotate a special black and white pattern called a Benham's Disk, it produces the illusion of colored rings.

In this activity, learners create a simple “top” from a CD, marble and bottle cap, and use it as a spinning platform for a variety of illusion-generating patterns.