How To Make An Ames Room Illusion - Psychology for Kids - ExpeRimental #23

Experiment with your perception of distance and size by making the amazing Ames room illusion in this fun experiment for children.
Download the template from here: http://www.rigb.org/families/experimental/small-or-far-away
Tell us what you think, and you could win £100: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ZGHPJ7H
Send us a photo of your Ames room, and you could win £100! http://www.rigb.org/families/experimental/competition

We know that a toy car is much smaller than a real one, but when you hold a car up to your eye and compare it to a car in the distance, they can look the same size.

We intuitively understand this, but thinking about why this happens is the start of a fun experiment to investigate how our brains make sense of the three dimensional world around us. In this video, Dwain and Sahara learn a simple trick to make their drawings look three-dimensional, and then build an Ames room: a classic illusion that plays a trick on your mind with strange proportions.

Download the templates to build your own model here. Do you think the illusion would work on a big scale too? We once tried it! Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOeo8zMBfTA

This series of ExpeRimental is supported by the British Psychological Society: https://beta.bps.org.uk/

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