Find out more about the senses, our main interface with the surrounding world, and have fun challenging them.
Just when you lose the certainty of sensory reality, you understand the importance of reasoning and logical deductions.
If you position yourself correctly, you will feel as if you are suspended in the air as if you were flying. Other people will also see the same thing if they find the right angle to look at you.
The real object and its images reflected by the mirrors generate hypnotic and unrepeatable figures. Give the optical effect your personal touch!
The semi-transparent mirrors mix the features of your face and that of the other person, giving rise to an original face.
The cleverly camouflaged mirrors create an optical illusion that makes you question what is “really real” and what is “virtual”.
By entering this room, you will experience the sensation of infinity thanks to the multiple reflections in the mirrors. The touch of class? The lights on the ceiling. Just try it!
Inside this room, nothing is as it seems! For the external observer, anyone who enters the room can become very tall or very short depending on their position.
Go along the walkway and test your eyesight and your center of balance: disorientation guaranteed!
Go along the walkway and test your eyesight and your center of balance: disorientation guaranteed!
The special glasses produce an altered view of reality, forcing the brain to reinterpret the data. Upside down emotions!
Fondazione “Villa del Balì”
Loc. San Martino snc
61036 Colli al Metauro (PU)
0721 892390
info@museodelbali.it
The mirrors on the side of the table reflect the pattern of the floor tiles and the walls producing the illusion that your body is missing! The illusion works for both you and for whoever is standing in front of the exhibit. When you view this exhibit from the front, without anyone standing behind the table, it appears to simply be a room with a table up against the back wall. There is nothing apparently unusual. The table has three visible legs with, presumably, the rear fourth leg concealed by the front one. You can see through the legs of the table to the wall behind. Instead of being a normal table, however, this table has two cleverly concealed mirrored panels which mean that when you put your head through the hole in the exhibit, your body seems to disappear.
This optical illusion was originally called the “Sphinx” illusion. It was created by Thomas
William Tobin in the late 19th Century.
Mirrors are frequently used as part of special effects in film and television. In the Star Wars films, for instance, mirrors were used to create the illusion that Luke Skywalker’s land speeder was hovering above the ground. A broom was attached to the underside of the vehicle to lift it off the ground. An angled mirror then concealed the broom. This reflected the ground, in the same way as the mirrors in the Head Only exhibit reflects the sidewalls. In the film this created the illusion that you can see underneath the vehicle.
The infinity room consists of mirrors arranged at 60° angles. Thanks to this configuration, not only can your image be multiplied infinitely, but you can also understand the basics of plane tessellation. Plane tessellation is a division of the plane using identical geometric figures that fill the space without overlaps and without gaps. In this case, the figures are called tiles. For a regular polygon to tessellate the plane, it is necessary that its internal angle is a divisor of 360°. Even in ancient Greece, it was known that only three of these can cover the plane: the triangle (equilateral, the only regular one), the square, and the hexagon. Equilateral triangles can be arranged in rows that can slide past each other in infinite ways. The same applies to squares. However, tessellation with regular hexagons, so familiar to bees, can only be achieved in one way.
This room is currently known as the Ames room. Adelbert Ames (a U.S. pioneer in the study of physiological optics) created this kind of optical illusion in the first half of the 20th century to study the human brain's response to information that contradicts our past knowledge and experience. In the case of the Ames room, when viewing two people of completely different sizes, there are two possible interpretations by our subconscious: the first is that we are observing a dwarf and a giant in a normal house; the second is that we are seeing two normal people in a 'rigged' house.
Despite the second hypothesis being much more reasonable, the arrangement of the walls, floor, and windows of the Ames room forces our mind to coercively choose the first hypothesis—even knowing it is in clear contradiction with reality. Unable to 'touch' the distortion or imagine it, even while being aware of the type of distortion, we are compelled to admit that what we see is not real, yet we cannot help but be deceived.
The Ames room is a classic example of three-dimensional 'anamorphosis': an anamorphosis is a painting or structure designed to appear deformed and unrecognizable when viewed from a 'natural' perspective, but becomes perfectly understandable when seen from the correct perspective. The illusory effect works particularly well when viewing with one eye, as a significant portion of depth perception is lost. In fact, the distance between the eyes causes the brain to receive two different images (shifted concerning the background due to the change in line of sight). From the comparison between the two, the brain processes the dimension of depth.
The pane of glass between you and your partner is semi-transparent so it half reflects and half lets light pass through. Thus, you will see a face which is a fusion of both your faces. If one face is enlightened more than the other, it will stand out; whereas with the same amount of light on both sides, you will get a perfect mixture of both faces. To obtain this effect the glass has encased within a thin layer of chrome. The result is a mirrored surface that reflects some light and is penetrated by the rest. This kind of mirror is often called one-way mirror. When one side of the mirror is brightly lit and the other is dark, as it happens in the interrogation room of Police Department, it allows viewing from the darkened side but not vice versa. People on the brightly lit side see their own reflection—it looks like a normal mirror. People on the dark side see through it—it looks like a transparent window.
