Ames Room Research Paper

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Ames room is a slanted room used to create an optical illusion. The room appears to be a square shaped room like a normal one to the viewer’s perspective. In reality, it has a trapezoidal shape. This model is named after the American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. He based this design on a concept originally conceived by Hermann Helmholtz in the late 19th century. An Ames room is viewed with one eye through a pinhole to avoid any clues. This is called monocular vision. The human brain assumes that the room is normal and the people or object inside must change size, not the room. Each time you look at something in the distance, your brain’s visual system is calculating both the size and the object and the distance at which it is located.…show more content…
The back wall is placed normal which is straight at a 90 degree angle with the floor. What changes is the floor and the ceiling. The floor is raised from one side so it creates a decline. As well as the ceiling. Since one wall of the Ames room is quite larger than the other it creates a decline on the roof as well. One can tell the room’s deformity looking at it with both eyes, but when one person looks through the pinhole, it is different. The reason is that the brain has a built-in assumption that he wall’s room are usually parallel. This is something we’ve all grown up with all our lives. This assumption is so strong that it completely overrides the fact that the people are actually changing size even though in the real world people obviously people do not change size like balloons. Moreover, the floor is tilted from one side as well. Two corners from the same side are lifted an inch or two, depends on the size of your model. That is one thing that makes the object change size. The other thing is that one edge of the floor is longer than the other. So when the object goes from one side to the other it is not waking or moving in a straight line is moving in a diagonal line, not just that but it is walking downwards as well. So, the longest corner of the floor is basically the side who’s on the bottom. The shortest

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