Optical Illusion: Which cabinet is bigger?

Optical Illusion: Which cabinet is bigger?

Household rooms can look completely different when the décor is changed with different colours, new accessories or changing the position of the furniture. To put this to the test we have created an optical illusion to show how furniture can be viewed differently.

Looking at the below two cabinets, can you tell which piece of furniture is bigger?

Is the rectangular or square cabinet bigger?

To most people the left cabinet with the purple top is a long thin rectangle, while the pink cabinet is more of a square shape. To the shock of many, both pieces of furniture are exactly the same shape and size.

Modelled from the tabletop visual illusion published by Roger Shepard in the late 20th century, the illusion was originally known as ‘Turning the Tables’. This illusion is two parallelograms, in this case cabinet tops, that are identical, but one is presented horizontally and the other vertically.

As the parallelograms become cabinets, the angles and cabinet itself give a false sense of perception which creates the illusion. As we live in a three-dimensional world, humans want to see things in three-dimensional as much as we can, so we adjust a two-dimensional image into our three-dimensional interpretation. Therefore, we see the cabinet size to be drastically different even when they are identical.

Still don’t believe they are the same size?

The GIF below highlights how the cabinets are the same size. Once the base of the cabinets is stripped away and the shape becomes two-dimensional and is rotated slightly, they fit perfectly into one another, showing they are the same shape.