The best interactive museums in NYC

This aircraft carrier turned museum offers plenty of interactive exhibts, including a real-life helicopter you can climb into; a console where you can navigate a submarine; and simulators that let you fly a supersonic fighter jet, and pilot a racing drone. 

Part visual splendor, part olfactory wonder and part ooey-gooey sensory fun, Sloomoo Institute’s slime museum welcomes all ages to its home in Soho. You can even get slimed like on Nickelodeon!

While Sloomoo is a highly Instagrammable experience, the founders hope you’ll spend some time away from your phone and immersed in the moment during your 90-minute visit to truly have the slime of your life. Don't miss the DIY slime bar where you can make your own slime to take home. 

Besides a state-of-the-art 264-seat cinema, the Museum of the Moving Image boasts a dubbing room that allows visitors to record their voices over the lines spoken by Tony Curtis or Marilyn Monroe in the Billy Wilder classic, “Some Like It Hot,” and touch-screen stations where museum-goers can create their own stop-motion animations.

Sex is the ultimate in interactive fun, so it’s no surprise that MoSex features a bouncy castle made of breasts. Other exhibits have taken a more high-tech approach, with one case using VR goggles to take visitors on an exploration of “anticipation, sexual attraction [and] identity…around a shared infinite pole dance in space.”

Channel your inner James Bond with a trip to Spyscape. The midtown museum offers visitors a chance to learn about the mathematician who cracked the Enigma code, run down a laser beam-filled hallway unscathed (which takes some serious skill) and even try a lie detector test. Next stop: The FBI. All ages. 

Built for the 1964 World’s Fair, the Hall of Science welcomes visitors with immersive installations like “Connected Worlds,” in which they can learn about sustainability by using padded-foam “logs” to divert water from a 38 foot high virtual waterfall to six digitally simulated environments.

New York Transit Museum recounts subway history with a vintage fleet of restored cars that let visitors can climb aboard to imagine themselves as straphangers from different decades dating back to the subway opening in 1904. There’s also a collection of buses and a working signal tower.

As the saying goes, "You have to see it to believe it." The now-permanent Museum of Illusions offers 70+ exhibits in science, tech, mathematics and other fields that will have patrons doing a double take. This sensory-driven, all-ages experience allows visitors to take a look at unusual works, try their hand at games and puzzles and get to the bottom of the opitical ollusions. 

The House of Cannabis (a.k.a. THC NYC) is a weed museum in Soho. While the museum boasts plenty of mind-bending multi-sensory bells and whistles, it also showcases art and science. 

Check out The Euphorium, a massive spinning record you can sit or lay on while listening to music, from The Doors to Santana. With the room's impressive light show and hazy vibes, it's like a merry-go-round for adults.

A series of restored tenements at 97 Orchard St, the Tenement Museum goes for old-school interactivity with guided tours through period-accurate apartments recreating the homes of 19th- and 20th-century immigrants. Historical re-enactors playing former building residents bring individual immigrants to life.

While the New-York Historical Society (founded in 1804) is NYC’s oldest museum, it’s totally up to the date with its interactive exhibits. Touch screens illuminate the more than four centuries of American artifacts in the Society’s collection, allowing you to manipulate images of objects to discover more about them.

Ice cream is at the center of this 20,000-square-foot museum that'll make the cold treat even more fun (who knew it'd even be possible?). Across 13 multi-sensory installations, visitors to the museum can interact with fun elements like a three-story indoor slide and the all-pink Celestial Subway.

Even better: The sweet treats along the way. Yes, we're talking about unlimited ice cream throughout the museum. For adults, check out some fun themed cocktails as well.

We recently tried the experience ourselves and have a lot of tips for your visit.