Ingenious Designs That Will Fool Your Eyes | Hacker News Reader

Ingenious Designs That Will Fool Your Eyes

wired.com

86 pointsbsimpson11 comments

If you enjoy these, you should check out some of the installation pieces by Olafur Eliasson. His oeuvre is more about playing with/exploiting perception -- one of my favorite pieces was a part of his exhibit at the Chicago MCA in summer 2009, which was a dark room with a central illuminated waterfall. The combination of a single reference point coupled with a totally matte darkness at the periphery meant that every step someone took that wasn't directly towards the waterfall resulted in them reflexively extending their hands to avoid a (possible) collision. Really exceptional stuff.

I'll bite — how's the lamp made?

At a guess, I'd say its a round fluorescent tube hidden in the rolled/folded edge of the lamp - shining light up into the dome, which with the right angles should reflect back the light with the same intensity from any point. (Not entirely sure if it needs to be a parabolic shape or not)

The dome itself is most likely double-layered, so that you can hide your wiring in between the two layers.

I'd guess the shape is an ellipse. I remember learning way back in geometry that ellipses have special reflective properties: http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/courses/m309-01a/dawson/

It's 5 feet across, I expect that there are more than one lighting elements.

Meh. If you like this sort of thing, you'll enjoy FEZ.

FEZ is a 2012 game, available in the current Humble Bundle at https://www.humblebundle.com/ .. which I would characterize as a more interactive and celebratory accretion of spatio-visual mismatch and cunning.

I'd recommend not previewing it or reading about it: just buy it, then play 30 minutes of it. You'll go nuts. It's really trippy. (Mark of the Ninja, in the same bundle, is also great)

Less than the cost of transport to a gallery, and far more engaging. The internet is the art gallery of our era.

I haven't played FEZ, but if you like platformers, try Braid.

I've played braid and FEZ is definitely very much more connected, being built around oddities of 3D geometry and projections. It's almost like a platformer meets nintendo-retro meets Flatland. Honestly, you'd like it, you should try it!

Why all the hate? Geez. It's clearly related.

1) Starting with "meh" makes you sound extremely dismissive.

2) It's barely related. This art is about exploiting physics to make things that seem like they shouldn't be possible. FEZ is about solving puzzles by looking at them differently. (Or something... I haven't played it yet. The gist I get is that you're doing stuff in 3D when everything looks 2D.)

3) One great way to get down-voted is to complain about being down-voted.

Err, like I care about downvotes. I care only about understanding people's thoughts. Unfortunately, your content didn't display many, boiling down to: "Use of meh sux", "Even though I don't know because I haven't played it, I'm going to claim there's no relationship", and "stop whinging". This place is going downhill.

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