Wednesday, November 3, 2010

The Cubic Kaleidoscope I Made Today

Looking along the (1,1,1) direction:






Outside:


I gave it the name of "PlatoKaleido". Because this is in fact the three Platonic tilings, square planar(purple+red), equilateral triangular(orange+yellow) and honeycomb(green+blue) lattices, inter-penetrating one another orthogonally. The coloring is in accordance to the order of the spectrum of sunlight, if you notice. It is a great fun making this kind of kaleidoscopes, thanks to Prof. Takaaki from Kyushu University who kindly taught us earlier today.

My supervisor Bih-Yaw mentioned about the possibility of making this kind of kaleidoscope with other geometric shapes like triangular or pentagonal prisms. And Prof. Takaaki replied that they'd been trying everything possible already. However, I am thinking about using non-planar mirrors instead, e.g. concave or convex, making the "metric" of the wondering world therein non-Euclidean, maybe an interesting task. This is also related to some photos taken by Bih-Yaw at this year's Bridge conference. The artist made clever use of the curvature of the mirror, so the image of an seemingly unreasonable object on the mirror becomes a normal one (of course in this case the images are in fact the unreasonable structures that the artist tried to convey).

1 comment:

N said...

Hello!

Is there any chance to know how it was done? And maybe you could provide me links with such kaleidoscopes?

Thanks in advance.