Impossible objects
Drawings that look solid but could never be built: the Penrose triangle, the impossible cube and the devil's fork, explained.
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Impossible & ambiguous figuresImpossible TriangleThree bars meet at right angles to form a triangle that cannot exist.
InteractiveImpossible & ambiguous figuresImpossible CubeA cube frame where one beam passes both in front of and behind another.
InteractiveImpossible & ambiguous figuresDevil's ForkThree round prongs at one end turn into two flat prongs at the other.Parts that work, wholes that don’t
Impossible objects are drawings in which every small region is a sensible piece of a three-dimensional object, but the pieces cannot be combined into one real thing. They work because your visual system interprets local clues, such as corners, overlaps and line endings, quickly and separately, and does not insist that every local answer agrees.
Many impossible figures can be photographed as real sculptures from one exact viewpoint, where a gap or a misaligned piece happens to line up. Move a step to the side and the illusion breaks, which shows how much a flat image depends on a single point of view.