A YOUTUBER has taken a deep dive into an optical illusion that has baffled people for decades.
Discovered in 1947, the Ames Window, named after scientist Adelbert Ames Jr., is an image that looks like a rectangular window, but is actually a trapezoid.
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YouTuber took a deep dive into the Ames Window Optical Illusion Credit: YouTube
Its shape is essential to the illusion, according to Veritasium, which made a 16-minute YouTube video on the image.
When the image is rotated, the window appears to move from side to side when in fact it rotates 360 degrees.
Ames originally wanted to be a visual artist, and according to Veritasium director Derek Muller, he was fascinated by the way people perceive shapes and shadows.
“The key to this illusion is that we’re all basically used to living in rectangular boxes,” Muller said. “You know, houses and rooms where all the corners we see are 90 degree angles.”
This phenomenon is called “Carpenter Environment” or the environment of built structures in which rectangles stand out.
Unless you’re looking directly at something, angles
you can see that it is not 90 degrees. However, the brain uses these strange shapes to infer depth information so that it can perceive images at a precise 90-degree angle.
To test this theory, Muller cites a 1957 Harvard study in which children in South Africa were told to look at an Ames window and asked if they perceived the image as oscillating or spinning.
More than 60 percent of children who grew up in urban settings where rectangular structures were the norm experienced the image moving from one side to the other.
However, only 17.5 percent of the children in the rural group who grew up in villages with round huts believe that the image comes and goes.
To further confuse the brain, if you place a 3D object in a corner of the image and then rotate the window, the object will appear to pass through the window instead of rotating with it.
What can you see? Does it go back and forth or spin?
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How you experience the image may depend on where you grew up Credit: YouTube
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Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education