The depth ambiguity gallery

A new tool is on the site: the [Depth Ambiguity Gallery](/tools/depth/).

What it shows. A solid drawn as a wireframe, in orthographic projection, with no shading and no perspective, is geometrically ambiguous: its picture is exactly the same whether it turns clockwise toward you or counter-clockwise away from you. The brain picks one reading and, after a while, flips to the other. This is the "ballerina effect" and the Necker cube.

What is in it. The tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, dodecahedron and a helix. Two sliders: perspective (a little perspective breaks the tie and the flipping stops) and speed. The page counts how often your reading flips.

Why it is here. The tetrahedron and the octahedron are the two cells of the lattice that the book is about, and they are also the two clips on our YouTube channel. The gallery lets you try the effect on them yourself and see how much perspective it takes to make a shape "decide". It connects to a thread of the project — how a system without a reason to choose between equivalent states behaves — only as an analogy, not as evidence for it.

A 30-second video of the cube is on the channel too.