According to Jacob Aron, carving thousands of intricate facets into a transparent sheet recreates any image you want.
Sunlight shining through the window could one day project your favourite picture onto the wall, thanks to a new system that generates complex images by carving intricate patterns into the surface of a transparent sheet.
Shine a light through a wine glass and you’ll see refracted slivers of brightness overlaying the glass’s shadow. It is complex versions of these bright patterns, called caustics, that are now being exploited to reproduce a photographic image. Tim Weyrich, a computer graphics researcher at University College London, worked with researchers at Disney Research in Zurich, Switzerland, and Princeton University to manufacture Plexiglas slabs that generate an array of fuzzy elliptical patches which together form a predefined image.