Apparent

a footstool at your feet. a monolith at the door. the same cube.

a room in one-point perspective where the cube is pinned to one size on screen, so how far down the room you let go of it is the only thing that decides how big it is

A thing far away and a thing close up can cast exactly the same image on your eye; nothing in that image says which is which. Your brain settles it with everything else in the scene, which is why a tiled floor, a doorway of known height and a crate you can compare against are enough to make one object read as a footstool and the identical shape read as three metres of solid wood. Here the block is pinned to the same number of pixels wherever you put it, so its real size is set purely by the depth you let go at, and the room around it is the only thing that ever tells you what happened. That is also why the landing sounds and feels different at the far end: the block that fell is heavier, not nearer.

Concepts: depth, perception, scale.

An interactive you play with one thumb, on Wundr.