How an Ames Room works

This is a perspective illusion that makes people appear to grow and shrink.

[JesseRaylabrancaro]

I really admire your commitment to this video. I mean, you had to make the little room, the little Alice figure... you went the extra step, and I admire you for it :-)

[kyphilburg]

This is how they design movie sets to make Tom Cruise look as tall as his costars. When he isn't standing on a box that is.

[SchutzmarkeGMBH]

I had an Alice related thought a few weeks ago during my neutrinophysics class. If you assume a normal coordinate system to be right handed and matter to be more normal then antimatter, we do actually live in the mirrored world, as all (interacting) neutrinos are left handed. (OR you define neutrinos as right handed, then we live in an antimatter dominated universe)

[tseifman]

I don't know if it's still there, but when I was a kid, they had one of those rooms at the New York Hall of Science (in Queens, NY). It was one of my favorite parts of the museum :)

[leonc]

Been in these rooms before...it still works with both eyes even with a better perception of depth

[DanDart]

I remember that in Wonka's chocolate factory movie they actually had one of those full sized rooms

[jackcooper]

There's one in the Puzzle Place in Keswick and you can see the effect without closing one eye. You can even see the effect in the room even at the back wall; it's really weird!

[r_gade]

You are an amazing person! Thank you so much for making those videos i hope you´ll get more attention!

[kennethflorek]

This brings to mind so many other things relating to perspective. Representation in correct perspective, which today is considered normal, happened only after a revolution which swept the art world. Before the revolution, the awkward old pictures looked right, which now may be hard to believe. What is it that makes a picture look right?

For some years I have watched a lot more casually made Internet videos than anything else, which are made by just pointing a camera at something. (And I like that.) So, recently when watching some gorgeous videos made to high professional standards, I wondered why I felt some city-scapes of skyscrapers in particular looked wrong, without me being able to figure what it was. The buildings weren't distorted, so what's the problem? But, the absence of perspective distortion of the buildings was the problem.

It has been thoroughly accepted that vertical lines look wrong if they converge, so pro drawings and pro films practically always have it that way. But if you tilt the view up or down at all, as casual videos do, vertical lines do converge, because that is how they really do look. (Or is reality wrong?) This presents a problem to pros for tall buildings, because you can't get the whole height without tilting a normal camera. For pros, there is an abnormal camera, which offsets the lens a large amount from being centered on the sensor, but both the sensor and the lens are kept strictly level, which keeps vertical lines from converging.

 This abnormal camera produces a view, it seems to me, unlike what a human being sees, and I wonder why I have been accepting it. How can you somehow look up or down at the buildings, and not have their vertical lines converge?

This, however, opens another can of worms. To be perfectly frank, I have never noticed any parallel lines that seem to converge in the real world, just in pictures. I just looked around now to check. All parallel lines seem parallel.

[lambertbrother]

If you've read the book a lot of times and are looking for something a bit different, I highly recommend reading Anthony Browne's version. Lewis Carroll's words, but Browne has added some fantastic illustrations that really match the tone of the book, and there's always new details to spot, especially in his depiction of the mad Hatter's Tea Party.

[EliteZera]

0:22 imagine if he didn’t continue his sentence

[jackcooper]

I went to one in Keswick (the Puzzle Place) and even when in the room people looked like they were getting bigger and smaller- there wasn’t a peep hole either, just a window

[kylomeg]

The alice in wonderland theme in the last couple of videos was really quite unique! It's a great idea, I thought it worked well. Really enjoying your content so far.

[eliasdavalos]

If you live in oregon, they have an ames room at OMSI as well as other neat stuff

[simondancer]

I visited an Ames room in Keswick of all places. I don't know why they're not more popular. The one in Keswick is the only one I know of in Britain that's open to the public.

[paulfoster]

Hmmm, back in college, my freshman chemistry prof (an Aussie who was schooled in London) quipped that in times of trouble all the English refer to the Bible, Shakespeare, and Alice to calm themselves -- not necessarily in that order. I guess you're young old for that tradition.

[kennethflorek]

You put the distorted room inside a rectangular box to cue our visual system, which then has one more cause to interpret the distorted room as rectangular. If you understand it is an illusion, it is beyond the reasoning mind to set aside a cue to the visual system. (Seeing is usually very convincing.) So little of what we see, or think we see, is not by our eyes, but by our brains, and not much territory is devoted to the reasoning mind. Knowing it is a trick, it still looks real.

Albert Einstein would often make seemingly offhand, but quotable, remarks, to which he had given long thought. For instance, people always wanted him to explain how he got to be so smart. Einstein once granted an interview (why?) to a high-profile advocate of music education in schools, who knew Einstein was a devoted violinist, and Einstein for once was asked the right question. Einstein is quoted as saying that everything he had accomplished was done through intuition, and the way he learned intuition was from music.

If practically everything in the brain is devoted to something other than the reasoning mind, which definitely seems to be the case, then why not get the rest of the brain to do some of the heavy lifting. Very clever, that Einstein!

[mkirefu]

How does the squares on the floor still look the same?

[RollingHousesUK]

I'm watching this video on my iPad, perched on the exact same folding wooden table as you have in the video!

[patrickhodson]

"From a certain point of view." -- Obi Wan