I found the Ames Illusion fascinating so I decided to look into it more. The Ames Illusion is an optical illusion in which a room has a diagonal wall opposite of a peephole. This make it seems as though one person is a lot taller than the other, assuming they are standing on opposite ends of the back wall, when looking through the peephole. This trick is used a lot by moviemakers to make one person seem like they are a giant even though they are not. The Lord of the Rings used this tactic to make Frodo and Sam appear to be very short, for example. It is a pretty cool illusion. I found the Oatmeal commercial interesting because of how actors change sizes as the move and it really shows how the Ames Illusion works. It is entirely possible that this is completely unreal but I doubt that. It is interesting that the ceiling and floor seem to get closer together as the people get bigger. I wonder if the floor is slanted? It could be slanted or the floor and ceiling could be the same distance away from each other and it just seems like the floor is slanted. It is hard to rule our rival hypotheses because I have never conducted the experiment. In other videos I have seen of the Ames Room Illusion, the floor also seems to be slanted. However, from research on how to build an Ames Room, I found out that the floor and ceiling are not slanted. Based on the replicability of the illusion; my guess is that floor seems slanted because the back wall is diagonal. Most importantly, the floor seeming slanted because of the diagonal is bested represented by Occam's Razor because it seems too complicated for the floor to be slanted itself.
http://www.moillusions.com/2007/03/ames-room-video-illusion.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=Q45diWsVbHY
