Mirrors

Mirror illusions, as the name suggests, use mirrors of one kind or another to create the appearance of something that isn’t there (in the physical sense) or to manipulate the viewer’s perception of reality. These tricks often involve the interplay of light and reflection, resulting in mind-boggling visual experiences.

Earlier, we named a perspective illusion as a false view of reality, whereby we defined instrument perspective illusion, where the goal is to form a false (secondary) view of, or to project a false appearance of, an actual or imaginary scene (view distorts/changes certain aspects of depicted scene geometry, but may accurately reflect certain other aspects of depicted scene geometry).

Noteworthy is that the illusion is often caused by the instrument itself, but may also be due to visually perceived processes (an adjusted appearance resulting from a combination of natural and visual perspectives, as well as mental or psychological processes).

Mirror Illusions

Different forms of perspective image shape/size distortions, common to most types of perspective projection, draw attention to the plasticity of images and, hence, to the role of illusion and multiple truths that may be possible not only in the imagination but also in perceiving objects in the real world.

Perspective as a visual method highlights the perspectival nature of reality and the various processes—optical, perceptual, and mental—that are ongoing between viewer and object, and further to relations between objective truth and illusion. In some cases, a perspective method like cinema can introduce a new level of play into the window concept by exploring the transparency principle as a mirror for recorded reality.

Mirrors are often the simplest of perspectival instruments, enabling a type of false reality and multi-scale and multi-view perspectives. Earlier, we saw how forced, accelerated, and double perspective methods enable the manipulation of physical or object space. Still, when using mirrors, it is the apparent space or image space, that can be freely manipulated in a host of different ways. Marvellous perspective image manipulations are the result, being image fictions that often are not mere illusions but help us perceive, map, measure, and index spatial reality.

In forced perspective, the goal is to create an illusion that makes an object appear farther away, closer, larger, or smaller than it is (the scene’s appearance is wholly at odds with standard geometry). But do not mirrors, and related instruments like telescopes, microscopes, and cameras, being truly sophisticated perspective instruments, take this multi-perspectival ability to unrivalled heights in terms of plasticity?