If u see it tilted towards the bottom, try to look at it from bottom to up, and if u see it bottom to up try to see from the top to bottom (idk if that makes sense but thats how i find i can see them, tho ur brain quickly adjusts to the “default” whichever u saw at first), also blink…
Rotate your phone 45 degrees and it’s a rupee from Zelda
Now that you have successfully gotten your brain to flip the cube in to the different orientations; now while it is flipping flatten it to a 2D shape with a small square in the middle.
Now you are looking down from above at a pyramid and that same square is a flattened top.
That is clearly a crystal with a ring of facets around the middle
holy fuck AMD’s logo is a cube!
Monke brane and senses, well adapted to survive in the savannas of Africa, encounters math and gets baffled.
EDIT: Visualize the apes at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, scared but touching the monolith. Now imagine that the monolith is the square root of minus one.
Even knowing the other possible orientations I still had to force quite hard to see the cube change, once it did though it shifted between forms easily without much effort.
Now command your brain to see top and bottom cubes differently.
That’s because only the bottom and top layer intersect. And you can’t make more than two parallel layers intersect in 3d space, so yeah.
You really want to make your brain hurt? A cube is the side of a 4 dimensional object.
Funny how at first I had to look from one to the other to switch my perception of it, even though they’re exactly the same.
I feel like i’m being pranked. Isn’t it a cube? Equal sides? Are you seeing a different shape?
The way I tricked my brain into seeing the other perspective is I closed my eyes, flipped my phone 180, then looked at the image again. The cube was now upside down, even after flipping the phone back while continuously looking at the image.
This was a really useful trick, thank you.
It sort of worked for me. As I was turning my phone, I was able to see it in the alternative mode, but as soon as my phone reached the 180 degree position, it was like something clicked into place and I saw the cube in the same way I originally did. The clicking reminded me of when you see textures load in on a video game — it feels really trippy.
Two different orientations.
a cube looks the same fin all six orientations though…
Perceived one way, the side of the cube facing you is facing downward and towards your left and you are seeing the inside of the bottom face through the rest of the cube. With a shift in perception, you can see it so that the face towards you is angled up and to the right and you see the bottom face from below the cube.
Like this:

Now the trick is to make your brain do it without removing any of the lines.
Wait… so ig the illusion works because ur brain has to decide which face is the front face ig…
You can also purposely avoid seeing any intended depth and it’ll look like a weird diamond someone drew
Been trying that but it doesnt work for me :( any guidance appreciated
How I manage to do it is by changing my own perspective. Instead of thinking “I’m looking at a cube”, I focus on parts of it. For instance, at the very center of the drawing, there is a small square with nothing else overlapping it. That small square has two triangles touching it’s top left and bottom right corners. By trying to perceive those 3 figures as the main part of it, I was able to stop seeing any depth.
Another way is to turn the entire drawing around. The absolute top right 90° corner and the absolute bottom left 90° corners can be viewed as one aiming up and one aiming down, or as left and right. You essentially turn the drawing into a rhombus in your mind with extra details
There is also a weird 3d pretzel pyramid type thing it could be. The two points in the middle would be pointed upward out of the plane, with the outer hexagon being the base of the “pyramid.”
Yes, I was going to say “there is a third”.
Thanks, this is the only way I can get it to flip.
Now, with both on the screen, try to simultaneously see one facing left/down and one facing right/up.
What is this? Kata for one day being able to make the spinning dancer only ever do a half spin?
Oh that sounds like a fun mental challenge. Here it is for quick reference:

Edit: after coming back to this a few days in a row, success! I can now trick my mind into spinning either way, including bouncing back and forth in a half spin. The human mind prevails!
She’s always spinning clockwise for me, I’ve spent too much time in virtual reality
I hate this gif. I look at it and shes spinning one way. I try really hard to make her spin the other way. It doesn’t work. I look away for a moment. I look back. Now she’s spinning the other way. I try to make her spin in the original direction again. It doesn’t work. Wtf man.
I tried and u can kinda do that if u focus on the top one and kinda see the downwards one from the corner of ur eye…
I seriously spent 10 minutes trying to get this to work and as soon as I was righting this comment to bitch about it, it finally flipped.

both still look the same to me only with different shaded sides
This might make it easier to visualize. The original drawing is in the middle. The two different ways to view it are shaded on the left and right side.

Aha, this worked for me. Thank you. I legitimately have a disproportionate amount of appreciation for you and the person a couple comments above you who also posted a diagram — although theirs didn’t help me, I am glad that I was able to find people who had attempted to make diagrams (else I would’ve felt compelled to try make one myself, because it’d drive me mad otherwise)
This one yes! The third one is so much easier to get it. I can also still see the third one as the first
Focusing on the grey square makes it flip for me.
It’s not a schooner. It’s a sailboat.
Just 2?
The anime is Great Teacher Onizuka (GTO for short), in case anyone was wondering. Can recommend it, it is funny.
I also suggest pirating it, fansub or something, if possible. The Crunchyroll version (iirc) has fucked up jp audio and is really low resolution.
Same with Gurren Lagann, weirdly. Also the translations are actual ass and actively undermine the energy of it. The famous lines are literally wrong and timed and paced weirdly. Bad subs are like listening to a bad cover of Whitney Houston - you’ll get the gist, sort of, but not at all the experience.
And the cube illusion is the Necker Cube.









