Questacon’s Ames Room is a little different and experimental compared to other rooms you may have seen! This special room has sloping walls, floor and ceiling, but it appears to be a rectangular room when you look through an external peephole.
How large or small things appear when they are up close or far away can be fooled to create an illusion. When you walk inside this strange, distorted room, you’ll see yourself grow and shrink before your eyes. Even children can look as though they are towering over adults!
As you look through the peephole, people in the far back corner seem to ‘shrink’ in size, while people in the near back corner seem to ‘grow’.
This special effect known as forced perspective fools our perception of size constancy, so people look gigantic or tiny. The effect is often used in movies such as The Lord of the Rings.
Explanation
When you look at something, it projects images onto your retinas (the back of your eyeballs). This is called a retinal image.
Generally, if something is:
- far away, it will project smaller images onto your retinas
- nearby, it will project larger images onto your retinas.
Your brain also estimates of how far away an object may be when you’re trying to work out how big something may be.
If you don’t analyse distance and retinal image size, objects would appear to change size wildly and disproportionately as they move closer or further away. This is known as perception of size constancy.
Extras for Experts
When you look into the Ames Room, your visual system makes the assumption that it is a rectangular room and the two back corners are the same distance away from the peephole.
However, the person in the far back corner projects a smaller image onto your retinas (because they’re further away), while the person standing in the nearest corner projects a larger image onto your retinas.
Because your visual system analyses the larger and smaller retinal images along with the assumption that each person is the same distance away, you come to the conclusion that the person in the (near) corner must be huge!
Our brains can only make the best guess, based on the available evidence!
Acknowledgements
This Ames Room exhibit was generously sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science which has its primary node at The Australian National University in Canberra.
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