Rubin Vase

The Rubin vase, also known as Rubin's vase, the Rubin face or the figure-ground vase, is a famous example of an ambiguous, bistable two-dimensional image developed around 1915 by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin. The most common version can be seen either as the black silhouetted profiles of two people facing each other or as a single white vase, but a viewer cannot perceive both readings at once; Rubin included another bistable figure, the Maltese cross, in the same two-volume Danish-language book. Rubin presented a detailed account of the visual figure-ground relationship in his 1915 doctoral thesis, building on work conducted in his mentor Georg Elias Muller's laboratory, and used the figure to illustrate his broader principle for how the visual system decides which part of a scene with a shared border is the foreground figure and which is the background.