Room from One Photo
Look into a room from one corner for five seconds. Then rebuild the furniture layout from overhead, and find out how far you dragged the far wall toward yourself.
About This Experiment
You glance into a room and feel like you have taken it in. You could describe it. You could probably draw it. Room from One Photo gives you five seconds from a single corner, takes the view away, and asks you to put the furniture back on an empty floor plan.
Almost everyone is worse at this than they expect, but the interesting part is not that you are wrong. It is which direction you are wrong in. Errors left and right tend to be small and unbiased — you are about as likely to be too far left as too far right. Errors along your line of sight are larger, and they lean one way.
So the experiment measures both separately, and after a few rooms it can tell you the one number that actually describes your spatial memory: the fraction of the room's real depth you reproduced.
What Depth Compression Is
Every piece of furniture sits some true distance from the corner you were standing in. The position you gave it has a distance too. Plot one against the other and fit a single straight line through the origin, and the slope is your depth gain.
| Depth gain | What it means |
|---|---|
| 100% | You reproduced distances exactly. Rare. |
| Below 100% | Compression — you remembered the room as shallower than it was, pulling far things toward you. |
| Above 100% | Expansion — you pushed things further away than they were. Much less common. |
The same fit is done sideways, across your line of sight. Comparing the two is the point: if your sideways gain is near 100% and your depth gain is well under it, the room did not shrink in your memory — only the direction you were looking did.
This is not a diagnosis of anything. It is one measurement, from a handful of rooms, of a thing that varies with lighting, furniture and how much attention you were paying. Treat it as an interesting number, not a verdict.
How To Play
- The room appears from one corner. You have five seconds. There is no second look.
- The view switches to an empty floor plan, seen from directly above, with the door and window still marked so you know which way round you are.
- Tap a piece of furniture in the tray, then tap the plan to put it down. Drag it to nudge it. Turn changes which way it faces.
- When everything is placed, press Compare.
- The truth appears in blue, your version in red, with a line joining each pair and the error in metres.
The little arrow on the plan marks the corner you were looking from. Use it — the direction of your own viewpoint is what the whole measurement is relative to.
Doing Better At It
- Look at the floor, not the furniture. The gaps between objects are what you are being asked to reproduce, and they are easier to encode than the objects themselves.
- Use the walls. "Sofa against the left wall, two thirds back" survives five seconds far better than a remembered image does.
- Count, do not photograph. Noticing "four things on the left, two on the right" costs almost nothing and protects you from losing an entire item.
- Deliberately over-push the far things. If you know you compress depth, place the back of the room further away than feels right. It will feel wrong and be closer to correct.
Why This Exists
Vision gives us a flat image, and depth has to be reconstructed from cues — how things overlap, how they shrink, how the floor recedes. That reconstruction is good enough to walk around with and much rougher than it feels, and its roughness is almost entirely invisible to us, because there is nothing to compare it against.
A floor plan is a comparison. It takes the one direction your visual system had to infer and lays it out flat next to the direction it could measure directly. The gap between the two is not a flaw you should worry about — it is the actual shape of ordinary seeing, which you have simply never been shown before.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Room from One Photo?
Room from One Photo is a free browser experiment in spatial memory. You look at a furnished room from a single corner for five seconds, the view is taken away, and you rebuild the furniture layout on an empty floor plan seen from above. It then measures how far off each piece was, in metres.
What is depth compression?
It is the tendency to remember things as closer to you than they really were. Your error is split into two parts: how wrong you were along your line of sight, and how wrong you were left to right. Most people are far worse along the line of sight, and almost always in the same direction, pulling the far side of the room toward the near side.
How is the depth figure calculated?
Each piece of furniture has a true distance from the viewing corner along the line of sight, and the position you gave it has one too. Fitting a single straight line through those pairs gives one number: the fraction of the real distance you reproduced. Below one hundred per cent means you squashed the room toward yourself.
Can I look at the room again?
No, and that is the whole design. One look, five seconds, from one angle, exactly as if you had glanced into a room from the doorway. Being allowed a second look would measure something quite different and considerably less interesting.
How is it scored?
The score comes from your average positional error across every piece in the room, with credit falling away as the error grows past about two metres. Getting the facing direction right adds a small bonus. Three stars needs an average error under half a metre, which is harder than it sounds after five seconds.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes. It works on modern mobile browsers including Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Tap a piece of furniture in the tray, then tap the floor plan to put it down, drag it to adjust, and use the turn button to change which way it faces.
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