How Las Vegas Hotels Fool Your Eyes! The apparent closeness of Las Vegas buildings is a mix of optics, perception, and environmental physics. In the desert, the air is extremely dry, meaning there is very little moisture or haze to scatter light. Normally, haze and atmospheric particles cause light scattering, which makes distant objects appear faint and bluish - a phenomenon called aerial perspective. Without this scattering, the eye receives sharper, high-contrast images, tricking the brain in