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Hollow-Face Illusion

Made by Lucy Tan

We'll be taking a look into the hollow-face illusion and its artistic applications.

Created: October 15th, 2015

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Hollow-Face Illusion

The Hollow-Face Illusion is an optical illusion where the perception of a concave object appears as a normal convex object. This usually pertains to masks and faces, but the effect can also be seen with other kinds of subjects. The human brain sees the shadows and the form and because all the massive amounts of data that we have previously acquired say that the form should be convex, we perceive it as such. It's best documented against human faces, and the more human a concave shape appears, the most likely it is to be perceived as convex. Other familiar concave objects will also appears as convex. We "know" that the object should appear a certain way, and this trumps the actual information that we are receiving. 
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Examples in the World

Interesting real-world examples I found. It was pretty hard to find ones that weren't just masks, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the hollow-face illusion works in a wide variety of mediums and shapes. It's truly mind-boggling that although I know all these are concave, I can only really perceive the shell as convex.

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Face imprint in the snow
Hollow snow.thumb
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An impression fossil. Despite being an impression, the shell shape can still sometimes be perceived as convex.
Hollow shell.thumb
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The shadow of the box indicates that the light is coming from the right. The shadow on the skull mold indicates it is sunken in, yet it still appears convex despite the shadow information.
Hollow skull.thumb
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Examples in Media/Art

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The iris and pupil in sculptures are often concave to give a sense of depth, though we would expect them to be convex. It was pretty startling for me when I first saw the hollowed eye parts in museums. This close up, it's easy to tell they're concave though.
Hollow eyes.thumb
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"Looking at the negative". The face is actually concave. The hands simultaneously help and hurt the illusion. They help by giving an impression that there's someone behind the stone pressing their face towards us. They harm because the contrast between the hands and fast is a tell that the face is convex. Nonetheless, the face appears convex.
Hollow art 1.thumb Wilfred Stigera
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"Venus, Positive, Negative". This work appears to be a bas relief, but the figures are actually concave. Even with the strange shadows, the figures appear convex.
Hollow art 2.thumb Roy Adzak
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"House I". Though the shadow clearly indicates that the house is convex, the painted image tricks the brain into seeing it as concave or at least flat.
Hollow house 1.thumb Roy Lichtenstein
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"House I" from a different angle. From here, we can clearly see that it's a concave shape from the previous viewpoint. The brain's expectations fooled the eye into not seeing the concavity.
Hollow house 2.thumb Roy Lichtenstein
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Reflection

The hollow-face illusion is quite interesting. When I was looking for pictures to decorate this project, it was actually quite difficult to tell if the picture was concave or convex if there weren't other visual cues in the image. I'm not a sculptor myself, so the hollow-face illusion isn't particularly useful in what I do, but the idea of our brain tricking us and having us perceive something different than from reality is very present in media, particularly in more representative works, since idea is to get the viewer to see something that might not actually be there. 
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1 comment · Latest by Nathan

This is a really interesting illusion that I hadn't seen before! The Einstein animation really freaked me out. It's interesting, though -- I didn't really see the busts as ever being anything but hollow imprints. Is there a subjective force behind that particular illusion that some don't pick up on?

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We'll be taking a look into the hollow-face illusion and its artistic applications.