Interesting, unusual concept from artist Kit Webster, who has covered the surface of a flat panel display with a grid of square pyramidal prisms of various sizes. The image displayed on the underlying screen is designed to interact optically with the prisms, bringing patterns of light and color up out of the screen into the […]
I wanted an unusual shot to show off the results from my recent soda can label embossing project, and had some success using this unusual method. There is a classic physics demonstration, sometimes disguised as a bit of stage magic, in which pieces of glass are made to disappear by immersion in a liquid that […]
Here is a process that would not have occurred to me. Make: Projects user Kiers knew enough about the machines used by eyeglass lens makers to know that they use a “dummy lens” template as a pattern to cut the outer profile of a lens. He found an accommodating online optician willing to use a […]
Longtime MAKE pal (and Volume 17 cover-guy) Jake von Slatt shows us an easy way to hack an old pair of eyeglass lenses into a set of goggles for use around the shop, or when driving through the desert in an art car with no name. Good to hear from you, Jake! Keep ’em coming!
A liquid lens is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The really cool thing about them is that, though they have no moving parts (unless you count the liquid itself), they can achieve a pretty wide range of dynamically-variable focal lengths over a relatively short optical path. When I first read about them, the killer app was supposedly going to be phone cameras.
OK, so, maybe the fact that, under vacuum, Scotch tape will emit enough hard x-rays to image the bones in your finger is slightly more impressive, but this is still a pretty cool trick. My off-the-cuff explanation: Glass is frosted because of tiny imperfections in the surface, which refract passing light a’whichaways. The tape adhesive fills ’em in and, because its outer surface is flat, the rays can pass through more or less straight again.
Here’s a method for applying a high-gain optical projection surface using common, inexpensive materials—specifically, flat white interior latex paint and glass sandblasting media. It began as a series of experiments to produce a DIY “screen paint” by directly mixing these two ingredients. Though failing in themselves, these tests led to the serendipitous discovery of this process.
