The Upside Down Telescope

Using two magnifying glasses and corrugated cardboard I made a mock up of the upside down telescope. It works, flipping the image upside down. However, I would say that it works better at a distance as it's hard to focus things that are right in front of you. I also got some red cellophane to play around with using a filter. I felt this made the image a lot harder to see which may not be a bad thing to distort the image more, really playing on the sensory of sight. It was also difficult to navigate where you are, but this may add to the sense experience.

Hold the handles to adjust

Handle on each end

Slide in and out to focus

Slide out to focus at a distance....

I presented my experiment in class this morning (a lot of people in my group were away.) However I got a lot of great feed back and some really good ideas to push my project further. Here are some of the ideas that I discussed with people and suggestions I received:
 - Make the telescope 3D using red and blue filters. Then make an image that normally you can't make out and looks crazy but when holding the telescope up to it, it's clear and makes sense.
 - An image that only makes sense when looking through the telescope. Upside down ect....
 - A laser pointer attached onto the telescope to help make it easier to navigate.
 - Pin hole camera to flip the image upside down.
 - Research red filter and how some colours when looking through it look the same shade - play on this idea of colours and their shades when looking through a filter.
 - Making numbers or words upside down and then having to read them through the telescope.

I got a class mate to write numbers and words down and then hold them up on the other side of the class room. Then me and another class mate used the telescope to see if we could figure out what it was. I found that the image will have to be quite bold and dark when looking from the distance. If it's too light then it will be very hard to make out what it is.

I now plan to research more about this 3D idea, upside down images and filters (colours.) I will then get some images ready for next class for user experience. This will help me to understand whether people are making out what the image is.

Research:

3D glasses

I Just had a quick read about 3d glasses. I'm still unsure how I would use this for my telescope as old 3D glasses traditionally have a red lens and a blue lens. Each eye needs to see through just one of them and then your brain puts them together to make the image appear 3D to us. I don't see how overlapping the red and blue filter would work on my telescope. I would have to create something more binocular like - with two different lenses to see through. I will have to think more about this idea.

Upside Down Illusions

I have been looking at the way different images look flipped upside down. Image illusions. Here are some I have come across for different inspiration.

Images found from: http://www.designboom.com/history/inversionimages.html

Maybe I could print some of these out to test with the telescope and try with the filter over top.

I also found this BBC article with different theories on why our brain sees photos of upside down people with their expressions the right way normal looking. It isn't until we flip the image the right way we notice it looks strange.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bang/article_thatcher.shtml