Can anyone explain the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz CA? Only those who have been there, please.?

Answer 1

Been a few years since I have been there and it was great fun. I had a Blind friend with me and he was not affected. He let me know right away that there was a tilt to the house.

I proceeded to tell him about the optical illusions I was experiencing so he could enjoy it with me. The tilting creates optical illusions. I also closed my eyes and could really feel the tilt. I found out later, the house is tilted at a 20-degree angle from the ground

Even though I knew the secret, it did not diminish the fun. I know a lot of secrets to illusions of magic and I still enjoy watching them preformed. It is not how it is done that counts, it is how well.

Answer 2

Been there, seen that:) i have only one word to describe it- AMAZING!!!

At Santa Cruz's "Mystery Spot," balls roll uphill, chairs sit on walls and people lean over so far they can't see their shoes, yet they don't fall down. All the visual illusions in the Mystery House derive from the fact that the house is tilted.

It doesn't take a scientist to know that ******** rooms affect perception. If floors are slanted, for instance, people will hang pictures on a slant.

But what has not been known before is that when the perceiver's body also is tilted, the distorting impact on vision is greatly magnified -- up to two or three times the effect of slanting the visual field alone.

"You know the house is tilted, but you don't know how much. Everything is tilted. You can't look outside and get a horizon, so you think that what you see is right. It's very compelling," said Prinzmetal, an expert on perception who has been to the Mystery Spot a dozen times. Although he has studied these illusions, he said his visual perceptions still are distorted when he goes into the house, which is tilted at a 20-degree angle from the ground.

It doesn't take a scientist to know that ******** rooms affect perception. If floors are slanted, for instance, people will hang pictures on a slant.

But what has not been known before is that when the perceiver's body also is tilted, the distorting impact on vision is greatly magnified -- up to two or three times the effect of slanting the visual field alone.

"In the tilted condition, you are much more affected by the immediate visual context," said Prinzmetal, who has tested dozens of subjects in a laboratory chair tilted at a 30-degree angle. In that position, he tests their ability to line up vertical dots in a slanted matrix in a darkened room where they have no clue to the true horizon. With their bodies tilted, he said, people's perceptual distortion more than doubles, compared to when they see the same matrix from a level chair.

"We are such visual animals," said Prinzmetal. "The mechanism in us that's responsible for determining the horizontal and vertical is mostly affected by what we see. If the context is screwy, that will throw off what we see as vertical and horizontal."

He said that other cues to people's horizontal orientation, such as the vestibular system in the inner ear and bodily sensations of gravity, appear to become less functional in the tilted condition, leaving visual context as the dominant cue.

Prinzmetal contends that understanding the principles of the Mystery Spot is critical for understanding other visual illusions that have remained unexplained for more than a century.

These illusions can make lines appear longer or shorter than they are, or straight lines appear curved and curved lines appear straight, among other distortions of reality.

Many of these visual illusions are also increased by sitting in the tilted chair, said Prinzmetal.