Illusion -- you can't touch that piggy
I was going through unread entries in Mighty Optical Illusions tonight...
This holographic piggy struck a mighty cord -- I saw it with my dad several years ago in some tourist trap store.. Universal Studios most likely. The store demonstration used the same pink piggy as in the article photo -- so between ourselves we always refer to it as "the piggy that is not there illusion".
We were both so impressed that when I got home I wrote a little script to calculate the kind of mirror it would take to produce the effect. Believe it or not, my dad was going to build the actual mirrors to try it out based on the printout of that script.
So.. Turns out the script is still there and still works. I dusted it off a bit and converted to the platform my site is on now. Take a look if you're curious -- full source code is there as well.
This image is built on the fly:
The image URL is: http://ejelta.com/am/piggy.png
Several parameters are accepted: size=##, noaxis=1, norays=1, hzcheck=1.
Enjoy!
This holographic piggy struck a mighty cord -- I saw it with my dad several years ago in some tourist trap store.. Universal Studios most likely. The store demonstration used the same pink piggy as in the article photo -- so between ourselves we always refer to it as "the piggy that is not there illusion".
We were both so impressed that when I got home I wrote a little script to calculate the kind of mirror it would take to produce the effect. Believe it or not, my dad was going to build the actual mirrors to try it out based on the printout of that script.
So.. Turns out the script is still there and still works. I dusted it off a bit and converted to the platform my site is on now. Take a look if you're curious -- full source code is there as well.
This image is built on the fly:
The image URL is: http://ejelta.com/am/piggy.png
Several parameters are accepted: size=##, noaxis=1, norays=1, hzcheck=1.
Enjoy!
posted by Unknown at 11:03 PM
7 Comments:
Ok - I give up. Why isn't anyone using a similar set up for a holographic display. I mean I understand that the object must reside on the bottom mirror.
Well -- you nailed it -- there still gotta be an actual object inside, it just projects the thing where it is not :)
So I don't know how it would help with holodisplays.. looks cool as hell in real life though..
The video is pretty good. BTW I like the addition of historical pricing at ISBNdb. We will be doing historical pricing at early miser, but I don't think I want to go back more than a year. How long will you be storing the data?
Thanx!
It's since inception right now (Dec 2004 -- about 28,000,000 records so far).
Don't plan to limit it to anything so far.
Why?
Well It's a similar problem to one we are facing. How to keep the data size relatively small while useful to consumers. You just do books. Early miser.com does books, electronics etc so our total data set is pretty large.
I was wondering if you were planning on keeping the full data - or just a rolling average?
Well It's a similar problem to one we are facing. How to keep the data size relatively small while useful to consumers. You just do books. Early miser.com does books, electronics etc so our total data set is pretty large.
I was wondering if you were planning on keeping the full data - or just a rolling average?
It's keeping full data right now and I plan to keep it this way.
Running average is fine, but I kind of like looking at these historic change graphics..
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