I have no idea! I just sent it to my brother,,,thought he might have seen it,,,he builds some pretty freaky stuff himself!

Truly baffling.

Thanks for the fun!

  Talked to my brother today..He says he has seen many models of this design. When they are free-standing it is easier to see,,,but, in this case,,,the cameras prevent you from seeing it any way but the way they want you to see it....it is baffling,,,,he said that,,,even though he has seen many,,,you couldn't change the angle of your view because it is shot to benefit the design.....The people really look like they are lifting their weight as they walk "up stairs" but the geometry isn't what it appears. The way they strung the people around it really enhanced it. Apparently,,the inclines aren't what they appear to be, it is similar to the effect you get with the 3d artwork on the city streets,,,,

Yes, but this explanation is only theoretical.  The climbers do appear to be lifting their weight, perpendicularly to the treads of the steps, not walking entirely on one pIane.  And unless they're all actors (liars), they're expressing real suprise and wonder.  I'm not implying that this is some kind of interdimensional or magical phenomenon or that it doesn't have a mundane explanation.  However... there are unexplained wonders -- like people walking through walls, bi-locating, manifesting material objects out of thin air -- that, if true, actually violate our accepted laws of physics.  Granted, it seems very unlikely that engineers at R.I.T. would create something that can violate the accepted laws of physics, but, in fact, an in-person visit to this stairwell is the only way to settle the matter.  

As it happens, I live close enough to R.I.T. to go and see this myself, so I'll plan to do that at some point and let you know what I find (unless I find compelling evidence elsewhere).  I'm thinking that a video of a ball bouncing down the stairwell would be solid proof, because the action of a ball being subject to gravity is not going to "lie."  So, if the ball refuses to go down the stairs this is just an optical illusion.  If it does, then it is a beyond-physics phenomenon.

Does anyone see a "hole" in this proposed experiement that needs to be plugged?

Here's enough of an explanation that will cause me not to make a special trip to R.I.T., but if I'm there, I'll take a look and maybe a video as well.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/escherian.asp

I'm more inclined to believe this explanation. ~ Noa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_stairs

Penrose stairs

Penrose stairs

The Penrose stairs or Penrose steps, also dubbed the impossible staircase, is an impossible object created by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger Penrose.[1] A variation on the Penrose triangle, it is a two-dimensional depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop, so that a person could climb them forever and never get any higher. This is clearly impossible in three dimensions.

The "continuous staircase" was first presented in an article that the Penroses wrote in 1959, based on the so-called "triangle of Penrose" published by Roger Penrose in the British Journal of Psychology in 1958.[1] M.C. Escher then discovered the Penrose stairs in the following year and made his now famous lithography Klimmen en dalen (Ascending and Descending) in March 1960. Penrose and Escher were informed of each other's work that same year.[2] Escher developed the theme further in his print Waterval (Waterfall), which appeared in 1961.

In their original article the Penroses noted that "each part of the structure is acceptable as representing a flight of steps but the connexions are such that the picture, as a whole, is inconsistent: the steps continually descend in a clockwise direction."[3]

At an Escher conference in Rome in 1985, Roger Penrose said that he had been greatly inspired by Escher's work when he and his father discovered both the tri-bar structure and the continuous steps, although Escher, in the 1950s, had not yet drawn any impossible figures and was not aware of their existence. Roger Penrose had been introduced to Escher's work at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam in 1954. He was "absolutely spellbound" by Escher's work, and on his journey back to England he decided to produce something "impossible" on his own.