Hermann Helmholtz: The Ames Room

Ames room is a distorted room that creates an optical illusion and tricks people into believing that one object appears larger than the other object when in reality it is equal in size. This room was strongly influenced by Hermann Helmholtz, yet it was created by the American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. in the year of 1934. The model, however, was not constructed until the year of 1935.
The Ames room is actually pretty simple and easy to understand once you learn how it functions. At first, the observer must look (with one eye only) through a pinhole so that the whole idea won’t be given away so easily. Once the viewer looks into the pinhole, they are exposed to an “ordinary cubic-shaped” room, despite the fact that it is actually made
in the shape of a trapezoid with slanted walls and an inclined roof as well as the floor. Ames was able to achieve his desire to improve the quality of visual art by studying vision and coming up with this model. This model is so accurate and convincing that if Krizia were to walk across it she would look as if she were growing and shrinking.
Adelbert Ames aimed to create the illusion where two people put into the same room with the same body size, shape, and height, placed in opposite corners of each other, would appeal to the viewer’s eyes as incongruent. Therefore, the person on the left corner of the room seems to be a giant, while the person on the right corner seems to be a dwarf. There are studies that have proved that the Ames Room optical illusion can be accomplished without using the ceiling and walls, and it works just as great as if it were to have both of those factors. It is possible to create the illusion without those two features because the trapezoidal shape is enough to trick the human’s mind with the apparent horizontal path and the angled background.