caustics
Caustic (optics)
Caustics made by the surface of water.
In optics, a caustic is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. The caustic is a curve or surface to which each of the light rays is tangent, defining a boundary of an envelope of rays as a curve of concentrated light.
Hiding Images in Plain Sight
An Article by Matt FerraroI recently made a physical object that defies all intuition. It's a square of acrylic, smooth on both sides, totally transparent. A tiny window.
But it has the magic property that if you shine a flashlight on it, it forms an image.
Caustic Engineering
An Article by Geoff ManaughA piece of milled plexiglass acting as a projecting lens; via the Computer Graphics and Geometry Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
New milling techniques applied to glass and plexiglass panels could be used to “create windows that are also cryptic projectors, summoning ghostly images from sunlight.”
[Pauly and Bompas] hope that the technique will be used in architectural design, to create windows that mould sunlight and throw images or patterns onto walls or floors,” which, if timed, milled, and manipulated just right, could produce a slowly animated sequence of images being projected by an otherwise empty window during different times of day.
Architectural Caustics
A Research PaperTo control the shape of a caustic pattern generated by a specular or refractive surface, we need to solve the inverse problem: how can we change the surface geometry, such that incident light is redirected to produce a desired caustic image?
Author and architect
My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.