Adelbert Ames Room Research Paper

An Ames room is a distorted room that gives an optical illusion. The room was first constructed in 1946 by an American ophthalmologist named Adelbert Ames Jr. and it was invented in 1934. The room is based on a concept invented by Hermann Helmholtz in the late 19th century according to my research. The room has two illusions, one is that the room appears to look squared when you look at it through a small hole in the front of the room but it is not it is actually like a trapezoid. The second illusion is that things appear to change in size when they move from one corner of the room to the other. The first illusion is achieved because of how the room is cleverly distorted and because of the peephole. The floors, ceilings, some of the walls, …show more content…
When you look through the peephole all of this is view as normal and cubic. This is because of where the hole is located and how the light rays bounce off the two corners of the room and reach your eyes in a normal and aligned way. The way you see things is dictated by the past things you have seen in your life. So this means that you can trick your eye to see a cubic wall instead of a distorted room. Your eye will do everything in its power to make sure that what you are looking at is normal to you in respects to past experiences. Others believe that the reason that the illusion works is because it consists of equal angles and equal lengths. So if there was none of this it would not work. This is backed up by past research in the article that I read that says that people that were not brought up in places that have a lot of cube shaped structures will not have any trouble in seeing the distortion of the room, but this is why they place the peephole so that the illusion still works. The peephole takes away any accommodation your eye tries to make in order to see the distortion. The second illusion is possible because of the trapezoidal