Tag: optics
New mirrors reflect text the right way round
Mathematician Andrew Hicks is clever. So clever, in fact, that he’s managed to work out how to get a mirror to display text that displays the correct way around, as in the picture above. Mightily impressive, no?
He’s also done some other faintly magical stuff with mirrors, including a wing mirror that can display a 45 degree field-of-view, undistorted, and a mirror that reflects 360 degrees around you, again with no distortion.
Check out the full gallery of mirror fun at New Scientist.
Lightbulbs to replace Wi-Fi?
Researchers at the University of Boston have managed to come up with a way of transferring data through lightbulbs. It’s not quite as crazy as it sounds – fiberoptics uses light to transmit data, but in a much more focused way. The researchers propose to use LEDs flickering at imperceptible speeds to communicate with network-enabled devices at speeds of between 1 and 10Mbps.
Although that’s not very fast for video streaming or online gaming, it’s more than enough for an internet enabled fridge, photoframe or printer. Those kinds of devices are the target that these researchers are going after – bringing the digital home one step closer to reality…
