Work or Play?

I wanted to give everyone a taste of what I do on a regular basis, so here are some images from a recent show I developed about Superheroes.

For a discussion of Wonder Woman and how she bends light, a laser shining through a 2L bottle and into a falling stream of water. Instead of continuing through the stream, the laser reflects off of the edges and remains trapped in it. I'm holding my hand in the stream, where you can see the dot from the laser pointer. The second photograph highlights that even better.

This detail shows the laser beam reflecting off the stream right after it exits the hole. You can see the second reflection as a vertical green line shortly before the water starts to fall.

Relatedly, here is my hand in a Rochester Invisibility Cloak. It's a four lens setup that bends light (hence the related portion) around objects so that you can see the background behind the object. You can see the soft horizon across the upper part of the lens.

 And the last one in our repertoire is pyrex lab equipment in vegetable oil. In the animation below I'm dipping a test tube into the oil. Because the oil bends the light at the same angle as the pyrex lab equipment the pyrex appears to...disappear when dipped into the vegetable oil.

My final stop in our virtual tour is the fire piston. It's a tube setup that can ignite kindling when the air inside is compressed quickly.