The "Ambiguous Image" Effect

The Trick: "Ambiguous Images"

For my project, I chose the Ambiguous Image Effect. When I was much younger, I found the optical illusion below, and it blew my mind:

Another famous example is the one below:

How It Works

These ambiguous images take advantage of the fact that our brains make very rough approximations of what we see: input from tens thousands of photoreceptors is funneled into a few thousand of ganglion cells, dozens of V1 cells, and end up contributing to a handful of neurons that fire with regards to recognizing a particular complex object (such as a duck or rabbit). Depending on orientation or the center of our focus, entirely different photoreceptors and ganglion cells fire, resulting in interesting twists to what we see.

In Our World

The above images, shared on social media, highlight one of the most common types of this exploit of the senses. Our ability to recognize faces is in some cases overly sensitive, so two juxtaposed faces, when first perceived, are quickly modeled in our minds as one. Only after examining other pieces of the image and finding greater detail does the mind find separation and piece together what is actually there.

Above is another example often used in social media or websites as a "dirty mind test." As in the previous example, there is a clear "correct" answer in this image and the mind typically works out the outline of the lamp within a few seconds. The high contrast between the lamp base and plastic cover, however, cause the eye to perceive the separation initially as the line between background and foreground, so the back wall is lumped together with the darker base until the image is more closely examined.

In Media / Art

Oleg Shuplyak is a Ukrainian artist born in 1967, well-known for his oil paintings of faces created from scenes of many well-placed interacting pieces. His paintings, in particular, I found quite interesting; he managed to create a cohesive scene with a remarkable sense of placement even with the forced arrangement and lighting of the face. Rather than simply disguise faces within the paintings, Shuplyak imbues a unique expression within each work.

As my last two examples show, this illusion is also popular with advertisements, with the following ad by Jeep above going somewhat viral on Tumblr (a series of these ads were shared over 50,000 times). Jeep managed to create a sense of flexibility in their own line by creating an ad that, though static, was flexible in interpretations through differing orientations and perspectives.

Reflection

I expected to see a wide variety of art taking advantage of this optical illusion, but I actually found it difficult to find real-life examples without intruding on other illusions covered in class. This illusion is very similar to images showing multistable perception, so I attempted to stay as cleanly into the cookie-cutter ambiguous images as possible. In my own digital media, I can imagine myself combining elements of the above, working with regular objects to compose a composite image with personality, but also playing with color in an interesting way.