The Ames Window Illusion: Something that can make you doubt both the universe and human science

You probably already know "The Ames Room", one of the most famous and popular hallucinations in the world. In it, when a person moves from one corner of the room to another, they suddenly transform from a small person to a giant and vice versa.

Ames rooms like these are made from the same recipe, and you can also design such a psychedelic room at home, if you can. It was discovered by Adelbert Ames, an American scientist who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

 Ames also has an even more "confusion" hallucination

But what many people don't know is that Ames has an even more " confusion" hallucination . It is designed very simply and is called " Ames window " . This is an illusion that not only makes you not believe your eyes, but it can even cause doubts about reality, science, the universe as well as our human physics.

The Ames Window illusion and the mysteries behind it.

1. Ames . Window

This illusion was designed by Adelbert Ames in 1947 while he was studying how human vision interacts with architectural forms. Ames discovered that in reality, we are looking at rectangular objects, such as windows, doors, walls, and paintings in a trapezoidal pattern at most angles (except for the front view). . However, our brains still recognize them as rectangles in all cases.

So Ames designed a trapezoidal window frame with one long side and one short side. It is essentially a piece of 2D cover, painted with identical shadows on both sides to create a 3D feel. Then, Ames placed the window on a turntable, setting it to rotate continuously, at a constant speed.

However, when the observer is placed at a point of view level with the window, they will see that it is not rotating 360 degrees, but just swinging back and forth at a 180 degree angle. In other words, the window rotates to one point then it stops, reverses to another point and reverses again, and so on.

The illusion is magnified when you put an iron ruler, or a plastic pen, through the center of this door frame. As a result, you will see the ruler spinning, but the window still wobbles.

To do that, obviously the ruler has to rotate through the whole window - something your eye can see, but your brain won't believe. Because that fact is so absurd, the ruler is just being fixed to the card but cannot rotate through the cover by itself.

2. Why does this hallucination happen?

In Ames 's " Building for Modern Man " published in 1949, he explained the hallucinogenic effect of the window that comes from the fact that we humans are used to living in rectangular boxes.

From houses, walls, windows, doors to furniture such as tables, chairs, cabinets, shelves, picture frames are made up of rectangles with right angles everywhere.

A world so called " Carpentered environment " or " environmental carpenter " is created when people know beveled flat wooden door frames around.

But if you pay close attention, the rectangles in our world are rarely the right rectangles from your point of view. Unless you are looking directly at a window, at other diagonal angles, the image of the window displayed on your retina is actually a trapezoid, not a rectangle.

However, because the brain is so familiar with the " carpenter's environment ", it still understands that these are standard rectangles. And the trapezoidal distortion is now used to let the brain infer the depth of the animation. The more the rectangle is stretched, the more you know you are looking at that doorway at a far angle, or in other words, the space has more depth.

 The more the rectangle is stretched, the more you know you're looking at the doorway at a far angle.

Going back to the Ames window, you see it is a trapezoid with one long side and one short side. Normally, when looking at a real rectangle at an angle, we will see that the side closer to us will be longer, while the side farther away will be shorter. It is conventional thinking about the depth of environments and objects.

But with the Ames window, it is different, when it rotates continuously, its long edge is pushed further away, but even from a distance, it still looks longer than the short side. Therefore, our brain continues to think that it is still closer.

At the point where the cover is facing backwards, this overlap or ambiguity of depth thinking causes the cover to rotate, but it seems to stop and flip over to change direction rather than spinning as it actually does. .

Ames' "carpenter environment " hypothesis was tested with the aboriginal community of South Africa, in which they lived in a " non-carpenter " world, in circular huts and shaped doorways. square appears more rarely.

The results showed that it was true that children who grew up in this environment were less affected by the Ames window hallucination than children of the same age growing up in cities in South Africa. That's because their trapezoidal depth perception is less common.

3. Skepticism about our senses and our universe

Since its invention, the Ames window illusion has not only sparked a visual debate. But it also makes us question the perception, as well as the science of mankind.

Accordingly, scientists are working by observing events, should make hypotheses and test them with real-world experiments. For example, Albert Enstiein used his theory of relativity to predict the presence of gravitational waves. More than 100 years later, scientists were able to observe experiments that proved his theory.

However, the Ames illusion proposes one possibility, that human observations are actually just "subjective" observations of our species and cannot be objectively verified without the confirmation of our species . other " human races ".

Accordingly, there can be an infinite number of realities which together produce a subjective observation, but we are only understanding it as a single reality. Suppose that when the ancients observed the Sun moving through the sky, they misunderstood that the Sun revolved around the Earth but in fact the Earth rotated on its own axis.

The Ames illusion makes us question the perception, as well as the science of mankind.

Modern science is recognizing that the speed of light traveling in a vacuum is constant and equal in all directions, based on observations and experiments. But is there another reality that can also produce such an observation?

In that reality, the light is just teasing us. The photons travel sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but arrive at their destination at the same time with the same average speed c approximately 300,000 km/s.

And when you do a quantum measurement, like the Schrodinger cat experiment, at the moment you observe its life-or-death state, whether or not there is a reality whose states are still superimposed, both alive and dead? Like the illusion of Ames windows spinning and swinging back and forth?

Or reality must fork into 2 universes, in which one universe the cat will die, the other universe it will still live. And in another universe where we might see more round houses than rectangular ones, the Ames window illusion would be less likely. People who live in that universe will also find that the window is indeed spinning at all angles rather than flipping back and forth.