Puzzling World

Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World is a tourist attraction near Wanaka, New Zealand. It started out as just a single level maze in 1973, but over the years expanded to add overbridges to the maze design (thus creating the world's first 3-D maze), a large "puzzling café" where guests could try out several puzzles, five large rooms of optical illusions, the Leaning Tower of Wanaka (which has a backwards clock that was started on the eve of the new millennium) and other attractions (such as the Roman Bathrooms) that ascribe to their theme of "puzzling eccentricity". By 2007 Puzzling World had been visited over 2 million times.

Contents

• The SculptIllusion Gallery
• The Leaning Tower of Wanaka
• References

The optical illusion rooms include a set of rooms built at a 15 degree angle, containing illusions such as water apparently flowing uphill, the octagonal "Hall of Following Faces" with spot-lit hollow mask illusions on the walls, and a perspectively confusing room with a delayed video feed where visitors can see themselves afterwards with seemingly different heights depending on where they were positioned in the room.

The operators of Puzzling World have for many years offered a monetary prize for anybody who can prove themselves to have psychic powers; all a potential winner needs to do is use their powers to locate a specific item located somewhere in Puzzling World's environs. To date the $100,000 prize goes unclaimed, although seven "professional" psychics have attempted the challenge. Puzzling World features a large maze in which the traveller must reach four corner towers before finding the middle courtyard (emergency doors are included for those who struggle).