Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

•	Traveling Exhibits

The Attic

•	Garage and Workshop

•	The Studio

•	The Theater

•

Waterplay

•	The Nursery

•	Welcome to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

•	Interactive Arts

•	The Backyard

Test reality in the Attic by challenging your senses and perceptions of the world around you. Become an apparition, capture your shadow or venture into a room where the laws of gravity do not apply.

What’s the Real Stuff?
The Attic may only have a loose grip on reality, but there’s still lots of Real Stuff in it.

		Gravity Room The room and most of the things in it are tilted at a 25° angle to the floor, creating a sensory illusion. Your brain receives conflicting messages here it can’t decide if it’s you or the items in the room that are not standing straight. Your inner ear, which helps you maintain balance and body orientation, is at odds with your eyes, that see that the room is tilted at an angle. We can’t always rely upon our senses to tell us what is real and what is not.

Phosphorescent Room Capture your shadow on the wall with a strobe light in this secret room and experiment with foam props to add funny shapes to your shadow. Draw with light-emitting diode (LED) pens to add more funky details.

		Animateering Create your own virtual puppet show on a large video screen using the Children’s Museum’s puppet collection captured in a virtual world. You pick the puppets, the scenery, the music and how your puppet moves. Direct the show using a joystick and buttons.

Pepper’s Ghost The illusion works because the glass pane, set at a 45° angle between the ghost room and the set room, combines images from both rooms. You see this same kind of illusion in a car windshield, as it combines the sky and items on the dashboard in its reflection.

3-D Sound Your ears help you locate sounds in relation to yourself and judge the direction and distance of a sound source. New three dimensional sound reproduction technologies can reproduce sound as we hear it in the real world by recording binaural sound sound from both the left ear and the right ear, recorded on separate tracks. These recordings make the sounds seem very realistic.

Explore more

Here's where you can explore more about these topics with the following books and websites. Many of the books can be reserved online from the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh. The first category is books and website geared toward the Pre-K child; the rest of the categories are for all ages.

Do It Yourself

After you've visited this exhibit be sure you try these activities: Cabinet of Curiosity.

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Gravity Room

Phosphorescent Room

Animateering

Pepper’s Ghost

3-D Sound

Attic Exploration for the Pre-K Child

Light, Phosphorescence and Shadows

Ghosts, Curiosities and Phenomena

Gravity

3-D Sound