Necker cube

The Necker Cube is an ambiguous line drawing. It is a wire-frame drawing of a cube in isometric perspective, which means that parallel edges of the cube are drawn as parallel lines in the picture. When two lines cross, the picture does not show which is in front and which is behind. This makes the picture ambiguous; it can be interpreted two different ways. When a person stares at the picture, it will often seem to flip back and forth between the two valid interpretations.

Necker cube on the left, impossible cube on the right.

The effect is interesting because each part of the picture is ambiguous by itself, yet the human visual system picks an interpretation of each part that makes the whole consistent. The Necker Cube is sometimes used to test computer models of the human visual system to see if they can arrive at consistent interpretations of the image the same way humans do.

Humans do not usually see an inconsistent interpretation of the cube. A cube whose edges cross in an inconsistent way is called an impossible cube.

References:

• history of the cube and a Java applet (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/nest/imager/contributions/flinn/Illusions/NC/nc)
• modelling human perception of the cube (http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/JAVA/boltzman/Necker)