Dragon with following gaze illusion

[William Gaatjes]

I always love this, i have one at home and it is always fun to show someone who never heard of this dragon with a hollow face. It uses and tricks some hardwired recognition features our brains expect in a face. When you move around, it looks like the dragon is following you with its gazing eyes and turns its head even.
It even works when filmed on camera.
If someone has a detailed explanation about how this works, i am all eyes.


For the pdf to print and cut out the dragon :
http://www.instructables.com/id/Hollow-Face-Illusion-Dragon-Without-Leaving-your-d/

Video :

 

[nakedfrog]

I put one of those together years ago, it sat on my entertainment center for a long time.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I put one of those together years ago, it sat on my entertainment center for a long time.

I still have one as well.
I think these paper puppets are perfect means to recognize paranoia and schizophrenic people who have not been taking their meds.

 

[FeuerFrei]

That's amazeballs. Kind of.

 

[ImpulsE69]

I need to make about 10 of these with my face. That should creep some people out.

 

[nakedfrog]

I went to a comic/gaming store in Austin years back that had a featureless mask in one corner that worked much the same way.

 

[TennesseeTony]

My mother is out of town until tomorrow. While she is out, I'm:

• Mowing her yard
• Putting a bunch of these everywhere in her house.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Aha, there is a wiki about hollow face illusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-Face_illusion

Faces and heads are naturally convex , but the dragon is concave. Our brain does not accept that and thus we get this illusion effect because of top down processing.

Hollow Einstein face.

About top down processing:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/perception-theories.html

Psychologist Richard Gregory (1970) argued that perception is a constructive process which relies on top-down processing.
Stimulus information from our environment is frequently ambiguous so to interpret it, we require higher cognitive information either from past experiences or stored knowledge in order to makes inferences about what we perceive. Helmholtz called it the ‘likelihood principle’.
For Gregory perception is a hypothesis, which is based on prior knowledge. In this way we are actively constructing our perception of reality based on our environment and stored information.

Summary

• A lot of information reaches the eye, but much is lost by the time it reaches the brain (Gregory estimates about 90% is lost).
  
  
• Therefore, the brain has to guess what a person sees based on past experiences. We actively construct our perception of reality.
  
  
• Richard Gregory proposed that perception involves a lot of hypothesis testing to make sense of the information presented to the sense organs.
  
  
• Our perceptions of the world are hypotheses based on past experiences and stored information.
  
  
• Sensory receptors receive information from the environment, which is then combined with previously stored information about the world which we have built up as a result of experience.
  
  
• The formation of incorrect hypotheses will lead to errors of perception (e.g. visual illusions like the Necker cube).

 

[nakedfrog]

They called it a paranoia mask (which makes sense) but I was never able to find any good results with that. Helpful to know the proper name!

 

[Humpy]

I hate that I think I know what I'm looking at but my brain won't let me see the truth.

Thanks to this paper dragon I'm not even sure if I exist anymore.

 

[Skunk-Works]

That's pretty cool.