Vista Paradox

The vista paradox, sometimes called the Sydney Opera House illusion, is a natural optical illusion in which an object seen through a window or other aperture appears to shrink as the observer moves closer to that aperture, even though the object itself has not moved and remains many times farther away than the maximum possible distance between the observer and the opening. The psychologists James Walker, Reta Rupich and Jack Powell first described and named the effect in a 1989 paper in the journal Perception and Psychophysics, titled The Vista Paradox: A Natural Visual Illusion, and later researchers Marco Costa and Leonardo Bonetti examined how linear perspective and framing shape the illusion, using Bologna's Asinelli Tower as a worked example of how a distant landmark viewed through a nearby window can seem to change size as a viewer approaches.