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So we recorded Lecture one last night, and we're just
rehearsing Lecture three, I think, at the moment.
So it's surrounded by the paraphernalia of
the Lectures to come.
But I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about the
Ames room behind me, which was one of the
demos from last night.
I don't think we actually mentioned it was
called an Ames room.
It's named after Adelbert Ames, which is a great name,
who was an ophthalmologist. I don't know what he was doing
inventing distorted perspective rooms like this
but he did.
So quite early on, we decided we wanted to build one of
these on this scale.
I was hoping, Andy, you might be able to make an
Ames room for us.
Yeah, I like that comment.
Did you notice that -
Oh, I didn't see that actually.
No, that'd be really good fun.
It has to be fairly large.
Yeah.
Choose two kids who are the same height, and you can
measure them up and then be sure and then they walk into
it, and they walk backwards and forwards, and you
literally see them growing.
And it's extraordinary.
We started looking on the net for plans of
how we might do this.
Downloaded a couple which seemed not particularly good,
so we thought we'd do all the calculations ourselves and
work out exactly how to go about building this.
So that manifested itself in fairly complicated
spreadsheets, which gave rise to prototype
one, which is here.
I don't think you can really see into it through that hole.
But you look through that hole, and you see...
If I look through, I can just about see a room.
So this gave me the confidence that we could make something
roughly right.
So the next stage was to build a slightly more serious scale
model of what we wanted to build.
Roughly a one-tenths scale of the main.
Once we'd made this, I was pretty confident that we could
make the real thing and make it look good.
I hadn't anticipated some of the woodwork challenges that
were to come.
So this took about three or four days work to build.
And when I say days, I'm talking 24 hours, basically.
It's almost nonstop work on this.
There were three of us, me and Mellis and
Gaz making this room.
Some of the beams at the far end, there's some really weird
double compound cuts going on.
So it's pretty complicated stuff.
And one of those days was just decorating it, and finding
some nice pictures from the collection, which is quite a
nice touch, I think.
We probably finished off the floor about 45 minutes before
the start of the show last night.
So it was typical last-minute stuff.
It was really great to see it work as well as it did on
camera last night.
It was really fantastic.
If you did ever wonder what on earth you learned trigonometry
for, this is it right here.