Universal Mirror: Imagine The Exact Opposite Of An Invisibility Cloak

Wow, the article's potential uses are pretty interesting

"The metamaterial could also act like a aggressive shield, protecting objects from airplane-based, high-energy laser systems, which are being developed by Boeing, by bouncing the lasers beam back at their source."

My high school physics teacher said more than ten years ago, laser weapons are kind of a joke since all the target needs is a retroreflector to destroy the source. Obviously the power of the beam has to be taken into account.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector

I want one now. drat

mikegriffin

There is probably something more to this, but, it has been done for quite some time using mirrors (3 arranged as the corner of a cube) or a big-ass prim. The are usually called "retroreflectors" (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector ) and they basically let you see yourself -or your eyes- from wherever you look at it. There is one on the moon's surface used to bounce back a laser -with which the distance to the moon is monitored-. I once saw a big one (a replica to NASA's one) in a russian science museum and its mesmerizing. You see yourself 10 or 20 times, with your own eyes staring at you no matter how. Its quite spooky but amazingly cool.

Most "cat-eye" reflectors on bikes operate on the same principle, thing is they are just too small to see yourself reflected there.

garci66

@mikeness: and cue soundtrack: (divinyls) "i love myself, i want you to love me..."

nevercryptik

You don't see yourself backwards in a mirror because the mirror reflects the light back at a funny angle. A mirror reflects light that hits it head on from the front right back at you. You see yourself backwards because the light from your left eye is being reflected back to your left eye. But if a clone of you were standing where the mirror was, your clone would be turned 180 degrees, and so the light from his right eye would hit your left eye.

A mirror that showed you flipped the right way round would have to emit the light that hits it on the left side, on the right side, and vice versa.

I think what this article is talking about is something different. This is probably a mirror which always reflects you. If light is always refelcted directly back, rather than the angle of incidence equaling the angle of attack, then if you turned the mirror away from yourself by 45 degrees you'd still see yourself. In other words, if you had a sphere with a mirror surface, it would look like a circular flat mirror from every angle, rather than like a chrome sphere which shows you stuff off to your side near the edges.

Elliuotatar

@Jakooboo the Great!: Like Keanu Reeves whoa.

Normal mirrors reflect light at an angle from the surface normal of the mirror equal to the incident angle. This *can* be 90 degrees, but it's a relatively rare occurrence.

It's a minor point, but...

Matthew Liang Chaboud

You would see a giant blackish blob, because every point on the object would be reflecting your pupils.

andruluvsu

@bosskev: He's holding your leash as well? Didn't know you were into bondage.

@ZBR: Try changing your screen name at http://consumerist.com/

Scotland

@JodaThongnopnua: Not mine; you're probably noticing my friend Governor Tarkin.

I'm not sure I understand what the picture above is. Is it the mirror? Or a glowing orb of upsidedownville?

aphex

With a perfect mirror you would not see yourself perfectly. You would think you were looking at a concave spherical mirror, no matter what the shape of the object was, where the apparent radius of curvature of the mirror is the distance from your eye.

andruluvsu

@mikeness:

(snickers) that was pretty good.

michael haendler

@switchblade saints: I think someone forgot their medicine today....



This is completely off topic, but I have been unable to change my screen name for days now. First there was an error when I tried, and it reverted me to my user name, and now the box to type anything there is completely gone. It's annoying, what's up with that?

@mikeness: Obviously photoshop'd. The article says the largest one as of now is 1x10cm

@bosskev: Your ego smells rather foul.

"Normal mirrors reflect light back at a 90-degree angle"

No they don't.

One of the very few things I memorised from school physics: the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence

look at me sneaking behind that bush up there..

"HEY ME! I can see me, I'm not fooling myself!!"

Interesting, so only the person looking at it can see themselves? Would be kinda cool to use as window tint.

Brett Benedict

"Normal mirrors reflect light back at a 90-degree angle, " I think it is more like if light hits a mirror at 10 degrees it will reflect back at 170 degrees not 100 degrees. http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/CLass/refln/u13l1c.html Basic Physics

ddrmaxgt37

@mikeness: My narcissism could not get any bigger. Local weather stations often erroneously report a high pressure system forming when it's really just my enormous ego passing through town.

dear god, the langoliers! run for the hills!

worst. giz commenter. ever.

@mikeness: I think that's a given. >_>

(Side note, why doesn't the thing get all wonky if I try to aim the emote the other way? < _ < Without the spaces.)

Whoa... Trippy.

Sweet, this will take my narcissism to the big time. By the way, I say photoshopp'd to the image above.

I believe if you looked at it all you would see is the black of your pupils. Right?

The illest wind

@Matthew Liang Chaboud: i.e. only when the incident angle is 45 degrees.

willyolio

Who better to blow your mind than this guy.

andyo

Damn new comments, I'll embed video on the next one.

andyo

@Elliuotatar: So how would a one-eyed person see him/herself? Left/right eyes are irrelevant. Notwithstanding parallax differences, BOTH of your eyes get all of what's in the mirror.

andyo

That's all interesting and whatnot. The real question here is vampires, what about the vampires? Will these things allow them to trick us?

sneakypoo

Shouldn't that be "Normal mirrors reflect light back at a 180-degree angle"? Or even at a variable angle depending on the mirror's orientation to the light source? If they always reflected at a 90-degree angle, we could never see a reflection of ourselves.

why not bend it 360 degrees? will that have a predator cloaking like effect?

So they've invented a real life enemy from Wolf3D, Doom, or Duke Nukem (etc.)?

Griffehpoo

@mikeness: which part of "and can only reflect light with longer wavelengths" and "10x1cm" did you not understand?

Looking at the image, at first I thought this was about those mirrors designed with computer modelling to reflect an image without reversing left to right, so for example, you could hold a book up to it and read it normally.

So... picture is unrelated then?

Photoshopped!!!!

@Matthew Liang Chaboud: I believe what the article is referring to is that normal mirrors reflect the image of yourself directly back to you only when the light cast from your body hits the mirror at an incident angle of 90 degrees to the mirror. For example, face towards a wall and place a mirror 5 feet to your left. You can't see yourself because the rays reflected from your body are hitting the mirror at a large angle. Now when the mirror is in front of you, the light from your body is at a 90 degree incident angle, and therefore reflects back towards yourself.

KineticRocketFireBalls