Pareidolia: Seeing faces in everyday objects

Duyser put it up for auction on eBay where it drew 1.7 million hits and eventually sold for about $28,000 (£18,500). Google Faces designers Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub were also inspired by pareidolia. After seeing the famous "Face in Mars" snapped by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976 and playing around with facial recognition technology, they became curious about "how the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia could be generated by a machine", Kiefer says.