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  • Visitors enter the Distorted Room exhibit.
  • Visitors play inside the Distorted Room exhibit.
  • Visitors play inside the Distorted Room exhibit.
  • Visitors enter the Distorted Room exhibit.
  • Visitors play inside the Distorted Room exhibit.
  • Visitors play inside the Distorted Room exhibit.

Distorted Room

See your friends go from tiny to towering in a few steps.

From one view, this room looks like a normal room, but people and things inside may seem quite strange.

Peer into what looks like a perfectly normal room and you’ll see an astonishing effect straight out of Alice In Wonderland: People seeming to grow and shrink as they wander around the checkered floor of this unusual room.  


Where:   This exhibit is not currently on view.
Exhibit Developer:   Adelbert Ames II, 1971

What’s going on?

What makes the illusion of this special room, called an Ames room, so effective is a carefully chosen vantage point. Viewed from a particular angle, this slanted room looks square, even though the ceiling on one side is actually about twice the height as the other. Since square rooms are the norm in our world, your brain decides the room is square—a decision that causes the people inside to seem to grow and shrink as they move from one side to the other.

A diagram showing the visual illusion of the Distorted Room exhibit This illusion has been used widely to create special effects in movies and television. In The Lord of the Rings, for example, several scenes set in the Shire relied on Ames rooms to make the hobbits look tiny relative to Gandalf. (click diagram to enlarge)

 
Phenomena: Cues: Dominant, Perception: Spatial, Size-Distance
Keywords: perspective
Aliases: Ames Room
Collections: A Question of Size, Seeing the Light

More to explore

Science activity that demonstrates depth perception
Size and Distance

So close, yet so far away.

Exploring Size
Exploring Size

Exploratorium Magazine, Fall 1995

Related exhibits

Big Chair, Little Chair
Big Chair, Little Chair

What happens when you double the size of a chair?

Ames Chairs
Ames Chairs

What we see can depend on what we expect to see.

Perspective Drawing Window
Perspective Drawing Window

Tracing on the glass produces precise perspective.


IMLS acknowledgment

This web project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [MA-30-16-0175-16].

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