How does an Ames Room work?
In: Physics
Something that might help you understand the Ames room effect is that our brain loves taking shortcuts. The more that it can think less about, the more that it can fill in based on its past experience, the better.
How does this apply to the Ames room? Well, when you look at a room, you expect that it’s a cuboid, right? That the rear corners exist in the same horizontal plane, equally far from the eye. However, the Ames room is specifically constructed so that while this *appears* to be the case, one corner is actually farther away from you than the other.
Thus, when a person stands at the true far corner of the room, the mismatch between the distances (where the corner *is* versus where we *perceive it to be*) makes it appear to us as though the person is far shorter than normal. When the person walks from the far corner to the near corner, they appear to become far taller than normal. The room’s geometry is such that, even though we obviously know people can’t shrink and grow, they nevertheless appear to.
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