Why Apple's iPhone is like a Necker Cube illusion, and why some people just don't get it.

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Why Apple's iPhone is like a Necker Cube illusion, and why some people just don't get it.

Date Created: 07 Apr, 2007, 10:06 PM

I'm sure many of you who visit this blog on a regular basis, either via RSS subscription or perhaps when you notice a post on MacSurfer, enjoy the mix of psychology and technology, not a common combo in the blogosphere.

And perhaps a subset of visitors have a minor or major in psychology.

In which case you will have spent a little time studying perceptual illusions. While the most popular of these illusions are visual illusions, it's perhaps so because they're easier to reproduce in book form. However, there are other illusions, such as audible and kinesthetic.

Why study illusions?

Well, from my perspective (ahem) they gave early thinkers about human behaviour an insight into how the mind and brain operate, something we can do more easily with modern instrumentations such as fMRI, CAT scans, and radioisotope assays.

And of course, understanding illusions is vitally important to the transport industry, especially in the road and air transport domains.

Illusionists are all about understanding how human perception operates so as to entertain us by tricking our senses into believing one thing, when another is true.

So, not only is the contemporary study of illusions a link to the days when psychology was really a subset of philosophy, but it has important in researching air disasters where pilots can be fooled into seeing things which aren't there, or not seeing things that are there.

I've described such an incident in an earlier blog about Keynote, where I highlighted the optical illusion of "whiteout" to help explain the crash of an Air New Zealand DC-10 on Mount Erebus at Antarctica in 1979. (It's worth the read, by the way).

The interesting thing about illusions is that for some, despite being told why the illusion works, we nonetheless can continually be fooled. This is because the illusion works at the perceptual rather than logical level, where understanding bears little influence in how an event or phenomenon is perceived.

The other interesting thing is that having seen an illusion in action, it is easy for us to see it again and even more quickly than before. Think about those Magic Eye illustrations (above, left) that were all the rage a few years back. You looked at the image and saw a bunch of colourful shapes. But change the point of focus of your eyes by not concentrating and suddenly the image develops into a three dimensional image and we can see foreground and background images, much like those old three-dimension devices, stereoscopes, you could buy decades ago.

Magic Eye images still require a little effort to see, and not everyone can accomplish the defocussing necessary.

In Psychology 101, one of the first optical illusions you study is one we can easily draw, in stark contrast to the Magic Eye illusions which require special algorithms. This is the Necker Cube, named after L.A. Necker:

"In 1832, a Swiss crystallographer named Necker published pictures of an unusual cube that appeared to assume different orientations as one continued to look at it...

The effect works because the drawing of the cube (an orthographic projection) carefully eliminates all depth cues. In attempting to fit the expected model of a cube to the picture, our brain must resolve the ambiguity as to which corner of the cube is closer. Different people resolve this ambiguity in different ways, and individuals resolve it differently at different times." (From Scott Flin's homepage)

Now, when you hear people use the expression, "They just don't get it", sometimes used far too casually, it's really getting at this kind of illusion, much like the Magic Eye, where people don't see the illusion. Indeed, with the Necker Cube, some have estimated that the rate of "flipping" from one view (looking down onto the cube's top surface) to the other (looking up to its bottom surface) is somehow tied into personality, in particular that referred as "introversion" versus "extraversion".

You can see this in action at this BBC site, and try the test for yourself, for fun.

These kind of illusions where the brain has too few cues to allow clear choices to make, see us "flip" between one view and another, creating instability leading to a sense of animation.

Here's my point: for many people, once the flip occurs, it is very difficult not to keep seeing it again and again. Or more precisely, it's hard to go back to seeing the same image naively - it spontaneously flips.

And this is where the Apple iPhone comes into the picture.

Once its introduction was over at MacWorld, such that it stole the thunder from CES in Las Vegas 400 miles to the East, there was an almost revisionist recalibration where Professors of Marketing as well as the usual suspects dissed the device. In recent days, the Rush Limbaugh of technology, John Dvorak, has pleaded with Apple to drop the iPhone based on nothing but some insider tip off from a Cingular employee supposedly in the know.

Not surprisingly, those in the Mac blogosphere complained bitterly about Dvorak's piece, which shall go unlinked, strongly suggesting it was just another act of Mac flamebaiting which Dvorak amongst others seems to have down to a fine art.

Do you remember how Jobs introduced the iPhone?

I've blogged about it extensively as an aspect of change management which you can read here.

And I've frequently referred to Jobs as a master magician, misdirecting his audience, something that rumour sites seem to play into as we get closer to each year's Macworld Expo.

But in reality, Jobs is an illusionist, who has an innate sense of how to design and innovate, disregarding the usual rules that "govern" technology design and implementation. Such rules themselves he proves time and again to be an illusion, and you know it's so when other companies then scramble to catch up with Apple's innovations.

In his long lead up on stage to the first public display of the iPhone in San Francisco, Jobs offered the illusion that Apple was about to introduce three new pieces of equipment: an iPod, a phone and a breakthrough communication device.

And he states it three times like a mantra, until he asks his audience "Do you get it?": it's not three devices but one! And the whoops and applause tells us that this audience has had its expectations (given the rumours about an Apple phone that had been swirling for years) not just met, but wildly exceeded. It's the Jobs cube (right).

Then in the days after, we saw the revisionists kick in, saying the iPhone can't compete with the established phone makers, the mp3 market was immature when Apple seized upon it but the mobile market is far more mature, Apple doesn't know how to make phones, etc.

Jobs' master illusion with the iPhone is to take a much-lamented but ubiquitous device and make us see it afresh, in ways that will simply not permit us to see mobile phones the same way again, just like a Necker cube. My prediction is that once you've seen it in action, used it yourself in the store, you'll want one very badly because you will not be able to go back to that Sony Ericsson, Nokia, or LG phone and put up with their shortcomings. Call it illusory instability.

And just like the iPod, and now the AppleTV, this will be another device that will be platform agnostic and draw the Windows crowd into the Apple sphere of influence.

And once there, when they get how Apple design and useability makes us believe the illusion that Less is More, they will feel a growing reluctance to return to the Windows world where the reverse is reality, as exemplified by Vista, Office and Windows Mobile devices.

Perhaps more than a few will also see the illusory power of Windows - that while the herd might smell, but at least it's warm in there - for what it is: that good enough computing is no longer satisfying when there is something better equally available if only they could avoid the influence of FUD and its promoters.

In the iPhone they will "get it" - a device that satisfies, entertains, is a joy to use, and rewards them for their substantial outlay and commitment. Once in their hands, demoed at a store or handed over by an Applecentric friend, there will be no going back. At least in this respect, the iPhone won't be like the Necker cube which relies on too few cues leading to perceptual instability. Instead, my prediction is that the iPhone will feel solid and "just right".

A new form of Mac users' "it just works" mantra.