This hollow mask illusion fools me every time

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Originally published at: This hollow mask illusion fools me every time | Boing Boing

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I tried and failed at letting it fool me.

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You have good reason to be. The right-to-left shades are correctly rendered when the concave is shown but the up-down shades are manipulated to show the light source from above on the convex and from below on the concave. Our highly evolved brains are sitting ducks for this.

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Who puts lipstick on the inside of a mask?

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I get lipstick on the inside of my mask all the time!

rimshot GIF

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It’s also presenting the mask interior with the same sort of shading as the exterior. If it was truly concave, the interior would look significantly different.

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Thanks! I knew there was something off about the shading, but didn’t watch it long enough to figure it out. This seems less like an optical illusion and more like a trick.
I do love me a good optical illusion, though. When that whole blue/black vs. yellow/white dress thing went around a few years ago, I stared at it until I could get my vision to shift from one to the other. Neat stuff.

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I start out seeing the illusion. After about 10 seconds the image has resolved enough for me to see the interior side’s nose as concave. At that point I can’t get the illusion back! (Going away from it for a minute or two resets the perception.)

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It told me that my shoe was untied and I fell for it. I feel like such a sucker.

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The famous “staring busts” in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion achieve the proper shading through some clever use of rear-lit semi translucent material. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve seen the backside of them before. Which, ironically, is the convex side.

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That was it for me too. Focus on the nose and it breaks the illusion.

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If I hide all but the forehead with my hand, I can easily see the inside of the mask as such. As soon as I expose the eyes, my brain flips it.

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Ran across on on Twitter that’s much harder to resolve! These are concentric circles but I can’t get my brain to see that and not spirals for more than a second or two at a time. As one comments notes, if you start with a small circle and focus on just that for a few seconds it helps but it still flips back pretty quickly.

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