Mirrors

A New Angle on Mirrors

A New Angle on Mirrors
A human sized variable angle kaleidoscope.

A New You
Bendy fairground mirrors.

Anamorph Drawings
Pictures that need to be viewed in a cylindrical mirror.

Corner Mirror
Three mirrors arranged at right angles reflect light back in the direction from which it came. This idea in used in bike reflectors.

Drawing in a Mirror
Try drawing whilst watching your hand in a mirror - it is very difficult.

Drawing in a Mirror (Traveller)
Try drawing whilst watching your hand in a mirror - it is very difficult. (Built to travel.)

Elliptical Mirror
Watch the reflection of a ball in an elliptical mirror. With your eye at one focus of the ellipse, and the ball at the other, the ball fills the mirror.

Focusing Heat
Heat from a hot coil at the focus of one parabolic mirror is reflected (like light) to the focus of a second mirror opposite it. Feel the hot spot.

Focusing on Mirrors
Compare your reflection image in flat, converse, concave and broken mirrors.

How Big Is Your Reflection?
If you draw round your reflection in a mirror - how big is the reflection?

Human Kaleidoscope
You can get inside this kaleidoscope to see your reflections vanish into infinity.

Images of Images
Find out how a kaleidoscope works with these folding mirrors.

Infinity Mirror
Two huge parallel mirrors send your image into infinity!

Infinity Well
This well appears to be very deep, but stands on a solid floor.

Kaleidoscopic Cube
Mirrors on the inside three faces of a cube make a 3-D kaleidoscope.

Mirrors at 60 degrees
A pair of mirrors held at 60 degrees to each other.

Mirrors at 90 degrees
A pair of mirrors held at 60 degrees to each other. What happens when the mirror rotate?

Parabolic Mirror
Depending on how far you stand from this mirror you can appear magnified, up-side down or distorted. At the focus of the mirror, your reflection does a somersault. Large convex mirrors are used in reflecting telescopes.

Polarised Reflections
Reflected glare from some surfaces can be reduced using polarising filters (this is why anglers often wear sunglasses to see under water).

Reflecting in Depth
Shows the reversal of depth in a mirror.

Reflecting on Mirrors
Why do you look the wrong way round in a mirror? Can a mirror turn your image upside down? Try to work out the answers with these three rotating mirrors, one flat, one angled at 60 degrees, the other at 90 degrees.

Retro-reflectors
A large working set of bike reflectors so you can see how the light is reflected back to where it came from.

Shake hands with yourself
Reach into a large concave mirror and you reflection reaches out - but can you shake hands?

Spheroscope
A large four-mirror kaleidoscope makes an object at one end appear to cover a sphere.

Suck-blow Mirror
This flexible mirror surface can be adjusted with air blowers to be flat, convex or concave.

The Divided Self
Each hand slides a ring on opposite sides of a mirror. Looking in one side, you see your hand and its reflection. The confusion between what your hidden hand feels and what your eye sees is very strange.

Through the Looking Glass
Adjust the brightness of lights on either side of this semi-reflecting mirror. Reflections appear, combine and disappear. This is what happens when you look out of windows at night with room lights on then off. In the theatre, this effect is known as Pepper's Ghost.

Walk-in Kaleidoscope
A three mirror kaleidoscope you can walk inside.