STEAM
IllusionForge
Science-of-magic exploration app where kids discover the physics, chemistry, and cognitive psychology behind magic tricks and optical illusions. Interactive science animations demonstrate forces, optics, and misdirection principles. Performance planning builds public speaking confidence. Concrete cause-and-effect reasoning satisfies the "need to know why" drive common in neurodivergent learners.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Veil
#E91E63 Characters who teach
Meet the cast
Each character in IllusionForge is one way our senses get tricked: missing what we aren't watching, the blind spot, colors changing with their surroundings, afterimages, pictures that flip, impossible shapes, depth tricks, endless motion, faces in things, and sound illusions.
Skim
Attention; inattentional and change blindness
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Vanish
The blind spot and perceptual filling-in
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Fringe
Color constancy / simultaneous contrast; context changes what you see
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Fade
The afterimage / persistence-of-vision — the visual trace left after a stimulus is removed (the foundation of animation, film, and many magic tricks)
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Teeter
Ambiguous / bistable figures; figure-ground reversal
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Notch
The impossible figure — the figure that locally reads as coherent but globally cannot exist (Penrose triangle, Escher staircase, blivet)
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Stack
The perspective trap — the geometric arrangement that misleads size and depth judgments (Müller-Lyer, Ponzo, Ebbinghaus, vanishing-point depth cues)
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Loop
The perceptual loop — the recursive / endless / barber-pole motion illusion (the mechanism that makes the brain see motion that can't end)
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Notion
Pareidolia; the brain finds faces and patterns that aren't there
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Cue
The auditory illusion — the sound-perception mechanism (Shepard tones, McGurk effect, phantom-melody, missing-fundamental)
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Science-of-magic exploration app where kids discover the physics, chemistry, and cognitive psychology behind magic tricks and optical illusions. Interactive science animations demonstrate forces, optics, and misdirection principles. Performance planning builds public speaking confidence. Concrete cause-and-effect reasoning satisfies the "need to know why" drive common in neurodivergent learners.
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned question kits, 400 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Veil — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How IllusionForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
IllusionForge runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
IllusionForge is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch
