Welcome to United Print Publishers!: More Optical Illusions

This visual really caught my attention because of its spectacular appearance and its illusionary properties. It also displays a great sense of symmetry as the faces and the surrounding are laid out equally on both sides of the page. If you look at it at first glance you may see an old man and an old woman looking each other eye to eye.

But then if you look more closely you begin to ponder whether the golden vase in the middle is behind the faces or in front of them, the image plays with our sense of perspective and proximity. The depth cues presented to us are not enough for us to be able to tell how far the vase is. It looks pretty big so it can be close, there is no layering making it seem as if it is in the background and it has the warm color of objects in the foreground.

As you begin to look at the image even more closely and enter the process of visual selecting, you see that the faces of the old man and woman can also be perceived as the bodies of two men wearing sombreros, one of them playing a musical instrument and the other carrying something over his head. The wrinkles on the faces then turn into wrinkles on the clothing and the eyes become the faces and expressions of the two men. This whole image is based on the sensual theory of Gestalt; there is no real perceptual value in the image.

Our eyes here could sense everything present as one thing or they could sense it something entirely different depending on what we are looking for and what we are focusing at. The hair of the woman for example can be a curtain over the left sombrero wearer’s head. The ears of the large face to the right can become a door with a woman walking out, his hair can be perceived as a white building in the distance. It is interesting however that we make out the faces first before everything else in the picture. I think this is due to our mental and visual tendency to just see faces and identify them before other things or body parts. It may also be due to the “F Viewing pattern” as we start off at the top left of the image and see a forehead and then a face. We tend to view pages in an "F" format starting from the top left.