Holes In A Wall
reveals how pinholes filter images. A perforated metal screen has a few pinholes spaced far apart on the left, and many holes close together on the right. By holding up a translucent screen, visitors can observe how the individual images produced by the pinholes on the left gradually overlap and combine to form a white wall on the right. What is ordinarily thought of as white surface can really be a mosaic of images.
The
Anti-Gravity Mirror
demonstrates how difficult it is to tell a mirror image from a real object. With the mirror’s unique configuration, all sorts of impossible tricks appear to be easy: a visitor seems to be able to lift both feet off the ground or make his or her head disappear.
Aurora
shows how reflections are created by both the shape of the light and the shape of the reflector. This reflector is a large curved sheet of brushed stainless steel. The ridges in the steel act like tiny mirrors, each reflecting an image. When the images from all the ridges add up, they blend into a single elongated image that looks like a ribbon of light. The many-colored tiles of the exhibit allow visitors to experiment with both the shape and color of the reflections.
Cheshire Cat
illustrates some of the things that can happen when each of our eyes sees a completely different image. At this exhibit, visitors look through a viewer at a friend’s face with one eye while the other eye looks at a mirror which is reflects a white screen off to the side of the exhibit. By sweeping a hand quickly over the white screen, the eye looking in the mirror sees the motion. Motion is one thing that grabs the brain’s visual attention; this distraction causes the viewed friend’s face, or parts of it, to momentarily disappear. The eyes and smile will usually be last to disappear.
“Not paying attention to something seems to be a very active process.”
—Perception Journal, Richard Gregory, editor
