Transcription
Have you ever seen a window magnify reality? This can really happen, and it's honestly very scary.
I had no idea this illusion existed until I saw it in real life from the window of a hotel room I was in in Sydney, Australia. From the window, I could see the Sydney Opera House. But as I moved away from the window, the opera house appeared to come closer and grow larger. It was so trippy.
I immediately researched every known optical and psychological mechanism that could possibly explain this particular type of forced perspective, and I found a lot, but I never found a name for it. So when I made a video about the illusion, I just called it the Sydney Opera House illusion. And after that video, a bunch of other people started posting their own versions of the illusion. Someone even created it in Minecraft. That was all really cool.
But I got to tell you, this recently I found this paper. It's from 1989, and in it, the researchers describe exactly what I called the Sydney Opera House illusion. But they gave it a different name, and they got there first. They called it the Vista paradox. So that's what it should be called.
However, agreeing on a name for the illusion is very different than agreeing on the cause of the illusion. We already know that two things play a role. The first is angular diameter, which describes how wide across something appears in your field of view. The closer you are to something, the larger its angular diameter will be. And as you move towards a bunch of stuff, the angular diameters of the nearer objects will grow more quickly. That's exactly what's happening with windows and the world beyond them. The window being closer to you appears to grow and shrink faster as you move back and forth.
But we also know that the Ebbinghaus illusion is involved. The Ebbinghaus illusion tells us that the sizes of the frames around something can change how large we perceive it to be. However, neither of those mechanisms explains why the Vista paradox is so strong.
You might already know where I'm going with this. Yeah, there's been a huge development in illusion science since I made my first video. The dynamic Ebbinghaus illusion. Normally, the effect of frame size on how large something appears to be is pretty muted. But if we make things move, it gets exciting. Lock your eyes right on this dot and watch. Out of your peripheral vision, the central circle appears to be growing and shrinking quite a bit.
This version of the illusion is believed to be a lot more dramatic because with motion involved, the brain has way too much information coming in and has to resort to more shortcuts, more illusory assumptions. And in exactly the same way, the Vista paradox is much stronger when you are moving or when you fixate on the frame or the periphery rather than the central object.
I believe that these two illusions are different footprints from the same beast, but the nature of that beast still needs to be teased out. But at least now we know what to call it.