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Because parking garages aren't baffling enough already.
"See, the apple's not giant. It's just in the foreground."
Depth Deception is what happens when depth perception goes wrong.
Sometimes, often due to uncommon conditions such as viewing through a telescope, camera or other similar optical device, people can get confused and mistake something small and close (such as an insect) for something far and huge (such as an Attacking 50 Foot Whatever ). Or vice versa. For reasons closely related to the Rule of Funny, this happens more often in fiction than in Real Life, though Truth in Television cases are not unheard of.
A specific subtrope is Big Little Man, where a character is introduced as being much bigger or smaller than they really are.
Compare That's No Moon, where a large object is mistaken for an equally large but more mundane object. See also Perspective Magic, where this can be used to manipulate reality.
When it's used intentionally as a camera technique — one of the oldest special effects on record — it's called Forced Perspective.
Not to be confused with Depth Perplexion.
Examples
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Advertising
- Tricks such as the one in the page image are used extensively to paint two-dimensional advertising logos onto horizontal planes such as cricket pitches, football grounds, baseball fields, etc. When viewed from the most-commonly used camera, the logos appear as they would if printed on a vertical billboard. When viewed from one of the other cameras, however, they look very weird indeed.
- Can The Man Your Man Could Smell Like take you to the freshest of distant cultures? ... Not quite.
Anime & Manga
- Las Noches from Bleach. Ichigo and company thought it was close enough to run to... and after they were forced to stop to catch their breath, it still looked as far away as ever. When they finally arrived, it would have taken them three days to walk around to the nearest entrance. You can't really blame them for making their own in that case.
- GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class mentions this concept in one episode, using the more proper term "trompe l'oeil".
- The Gundam SEED Character Theater does this with Torii, Kira's robot bird, which here is about the size of a small car (as Shinn, Rey, and Luna learn the hard way).
- It happened early in One Piece, when the crew sailed in a sea populated with huge creatures. They saw a dolphin coming after their ship... but it was huge, and looked normal just because it was at a great distance from them.
- In an episode of Pokémon, what Team Rocket thought was Ash's Pikachu wandering towards them turned out to be a gigantic robotic Pikachu that was approaching from farther away. "It's Big-achu!"
Comic Books
- In the Tintin book The Shooting Star, when Tintin looks into the telescope first he sees what appears to be a Giant Spider rather than the huge blazing meteorite which was partly obscured by a spider crawling across the telescope lens.
- Blunt Trauma is attacking Empowered! No, it was just his action figure Ninjette threw into the air to train Emp.
- A Crowning Moment of Funny from the Italian comic Sturmtruppen, as the sergeant is training the desert troops:
Sergeant: You'll have to learn how to estimate distances. You! How far is dat palm on the horizon?
Recruit: I'd zay about a couple of meterz, Sergeant.
Sergeant: Idiot! Appearences in the desert are deceiving! Now think: how far can be that tiny palm on the horizon?
Recruit: (pulls out a meter and measures the distance to the palm, that turns out to be inches high and just on top of the nearest dune) Two meters and 15 centimeters, Sergeant!
- In an issue of Robin, where Robin, Catwoman and the Psyba Rats are all investigating a house built by a rich practical joker, the Psyba Rats notice something odd about one hallway:
Hacker: It's a forced perspective illusion!
Razorsharp: Really? Because I thought we were actually getting larger.
Comic Strips
- In a Fox Trot strip, Jason makes a snow sculpture that despite being about an adult person's size, when seen from the front looks like a towering snowman giant getting ready to stomp. Jason remarks that "Forced Perspective is an underrated art form."
Fan Works
Films — Animation
- The whale from Finding Nemo. "I'm the little guy..."
- The Little Mermaid: Scuttle sees Ariel through a spyglass from the wrong end, and shouts to her as if she were far away, even though she is actually a few inches in front of him. When she moves the spyglass away, Scuttle exclaims, "Whoa, what a swim!"
Films — Live-Action
Literature
- Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Sphinx" is about a man seeing a terrifying monster walking on the hill outside the cottage where he's staying. It turns out at the end that it was an insect crawling on a spider web very close to his face.
- G. K. Chesterton references the trope in the Father Brown story "The Song of the Flying Fish":
"A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen, as, for instance, a man cannot see himself. There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon."
- A short story about a monstrous dragon on a distant mountain. But in actuality, the dragon always appeared to be the same size no matter how far away the viewer was, so when the protagonist climbed the mountain he found the dragon to be much smaller.
Live-Action TV
Stand Up Comedy
- An auditory version is referenced by Tim Vine in one of his more surreal moments.
I thought to myself, "Is that dog getting closer, or is he just barking more loudly?"
It turned out to be both, so he arrived before I expected.
Video Games
- Super Smash Bros Brawl: The Subspace Emissary: In the cutscene introducing Captain Olimar and Captain Falcon, the ROB Olimar is fighting made to be huge so that it seems the Captain and his Pikmin are still only an inch tall. Then Captain Falcon shows up then punches out the giant robot.
- In Kingdom of Loathing, before the Observatory was destroyed, it was possible to look through the telescope and discover "a giant space mosquito".
- In Super Mario 64, the room where you can enter Tiny Huge Island is a T-junction with a painting at the end of each hall, all of which appear to be the same size when you first enter: the one in the center is normal-sized and non-functional, the one on the left is actually slightly smaller than usual, and the one on the right is gigantic. The two paintings that actually warp Mario are also set in hallways that use forced perspective, meaning that until you start walking toward one, the images all look the same size. Which is actually quite jarring when first seen. Walk towards the small one and it's MUCH closer to you than it should be, with the hall way going inwards. Walk towards the large one and you're gonna be walking a looooooooooong time.
- Super Mario 3D Land encourages the use of the 3D effect in some sections. Without the 3D effect, forced perspective causes a block that appears to be part of the background may be in the foreground. There are subtle differences, but at first glance, you won't see it.
- A few of the off-path rooms in LEGO Star Wars II appear "correct" from certain angles, but are revealed to be skewed when you actually walk into them. For instance, the very first Protocol droid door in the very first level; a few gimmick objects are included to help sell the illusion.
- One dungeon in Nocturne has several fake hallways that are actually painted walls. You will often reach a junction where you need to choose between the real hallway and a wall. If you choose the wall you are booted to the beginning.
- The third chapter of Tales of Monkey Island uses this trope to reveal the true size of La Esponja Grande.
- You will never look at Gardevoir the same way.
- In Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil, in the Haunted House section of Joilant, there's a room with a straight path lined with ordinary Moos... except only some of them are normal size. Others are on a parallel path in the background, and when they jump over to your path, they are revealed to be at least ten times bigger.
- Equinox embodies this trope. Items are the same size regardless of their distance from the camera, meaning it is often impossible to tell where objects are except by trial and error. What appears to be a tower made of discs might actually be a staircase.
- Used in Kid Icarus Uprising in the Labyrinth of Deceit. The effect works remarkably well in full 3D.
Web Animation
- Nina Paley's Fetch does this repeatedly.
- The Homestar Runner episode from which the page quote is taken. Marzipan is just explaining an art technique, but when a giant Bubs turns up immediately after, she says the same thing about his foot.
Web Comics
- The trick is played on the reader in this strip of The Order of the Stick. Played with later on, when it turns out that the tiny piece of starmetal actually is huge, relatively speaking; the swordsmith says he's never seen a chunk anywhere near that big before.
- This Girl Genius.
- This Buttersafe comic.
- Played with in this Nerd Boy comic.
- Played with in this page of Dr. McNinja where the Doc says that armoured space suits were originally created to fight space monsters observed through telescopes. Of course, it turned out that they had gotten the scale wrong, and the space monsters are actually planet sized. We pray they continue not to notice us.
- Frequently used in Perry Bible Fellowship.
- This strip of Dominic Deegan.
Web Original
- Chop Cup. Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault in reality.
- In the fourth asdfmovie a father is throwing a ball to his child off in the distance. Actually they're just really small. Squish.
Western Animation
Real Life
- Several videos seem to show ghosts or other mysterious appearances that are in reality showing a bug crawling across the screen. See this page.
- Tilt-shift (or Perspective Correction) lenses, common on medium- and large-format cameras, can be used to make photos of large scenes appear to be miniatures.
- A story about André the Giant relates how, when first entering the business in his native France, he approached the promoter's table alongside a friend of normal stature. Because of Andre's condition (whereby he was relatively in proportion, despite his size), the promoter couldn't tell how massive he was from a distance, and apparently looked at André's friend and said to someone sitting next to him, "We'll never hire that midget..."
- Taking advantage of this is a fairly popular form of modern art, like the page picture.
- Julian Beever is an English artist who is famous for his art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium.
- Abbey Road‘s iconic cover was remade on Perspective 3D Street art with Peanuts characters at Universal Studios Japan.
- Since the human eye uses both eyes to create a 3D image, using the subtle difference between each eye's perspective, some people who are blind in one eye can't excersize proper depth perception and thus their daily routine could be littered with this trope.
- You don't even have to be half blind. Some people just don't have that kind of depth perception. People would still be able to see depth fine if they keep moving, though. Instead of seeing something at two different angles at the same time, you see it at different angles at different times. The principle works the same.
- The above is evidenced by this YouTube video showing head tracking with a Wii Remote. Because the objects move and obey where they should be in depth, you can get the perception that you're seeing a 3D video, even though it's from a 2D video (and this doesn't require a 3D screen either)
- And the Pulfrich Effect, where viewing a scene moving horizontally with one eye covered with a dark lens causes that eye to lag. The amount of lag is enough that other eye sees a different enough perspective to trick the brain into seeing depth.
- A traffic reporter, reporting on a slowdown at a local vehicular tunnel, said it was due to a giant spider attacking cars at the entrance. A normal-sized spider had crawled onto the lens of the camera, and quite by chance gave the appearance of a giant spider attacking the cars, thus combining this trope with Crowning Moment of Funny.
- It's been argued that reports of big cats roaming parts of the English countryside, the most famous being the "Beast of Bodmin", may just be normal-sized feral cats that look farther away than they really are.
- Reportedly, this happens all the time to people who live in jungles because they're so used to seeing everything close up. One anthropologist brought one of these people in a plane with him. The man commented about the beetles on the grass. The anthropologist couldn't convince the man that they were actually very large buffalo seen from far away.
- The Moon is actually both 400 times smaller than the Sun, and 400 times closer to Earth than the Sun. As a result, the two appear to be the same size.
- If we're going into astronomy, we might as well talk about quasars and their red shift. For decades, scientists were unsure whether these strange objects moving away from us were close by and fairly faint, or as distant as the Hubble Law suggests and therefore brighter than anything else that we have ever experienced. It was only through gravitational lensing from distant galaxy superclusters that we found out just how far away these things really are.
- As for the Moon, the Apollo astronauts had trouble judging the sizes of distant objects because of the way light works in space. While binocular vision is great at short distances, it's relatively useless farther away. For farther objects, we take visual cues from the way air gradually absorbs and disperses light, making distant things look fainter. With no air on the moon, that effect doesn't exist. There is footage of one astronaut bounding off to an apparently small nearby rock. And he keeps hopping. And keeps hopping. Until he's dwarfed by the gigantic rock that he's standing beside.
- Also, a star's apparent and absolute magnitudes. The apparent magnitude is how bright it appears in Earth's sky, while the absolute magnitude is how bright it actually is, corrected for distance.*
Basically, it's what its apparent magnitude would be at 10 parsecs (about 32.6 light-years) away from the star. Apparent magnitudes have been known (approximately) since ancient times; absolute magnitudes had to wait until the mid-1800s, when astronomers' equipment got good enough to measure the distance to stars.
- Similar to the jungle example, people used to (unconsciously) using things like trees and buildings to judge relative distances often have trouble when placed in environments like the Arctic tundra or deserts: in the right conditions, hills which appear a short distance away end up being many kilometers away, while a distant range of hills turns out to be a small mound a few hundred meters away.
- This is sometimes what leads hikers to suffer dehydration and exhaustion - they may think their target destination is much closer than it really is.
- Also can be seen when admiring an island off the coast. How many people have thought, "I wonder how long it would take to swim out there?"
- The city of Grand Rapids. Coming up to downtown, it looks like a fairly large city with a few huge buildings. Then you go through it and realize the buildings are a quarter as large as they appeared to be, and that it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to walk through the entire downtown district.
- The British journalist John McCarthy, after being imprisoned in Lebanon for several years, lost his depth perception (he had been chained to a radiator, in a tiny room, with a bag over his head). He only realized this after he had driven hundreds of miles to Wales for a holiday (well-earned, one thinks) shortly after his release, and noticed the "funny looking mountains" (actually valley sides, a few hundred meters away).
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