A one-way mirror is basically just like any other mirror, just that it has the ability of reflecting light on one side while on the other, it is transparent. Typical mirrors achieve a high degree of reflectiveness on one side, leaving the reverse opaque to optical light. This is done by covering the glass layer with a silvered coating. One-way mirrors, however, use half silvered surfaces in order to achieve a balance between reflectiveness and transparency, in combination with carefully adjusted amounts of light.
Practically, the silvered coating is only half of that of a typical mirror, meaning that it reflects half of the incoming light, leaving the other half pass right through. The concept is relatively similar to that used in lasers. Inside a laser, photons of light are being bounced between two mirrors, one with 100 percent reflectiveness and the other with 99 percent. Read the rest of this entry »
Electronic Arts has released a statement announcing a 10 dollar reduction in price for all those who pre-order the PC version of Mass Effect. The offer comes into play today and will last until the official launch date of the game, which is May 27 in North America and June 6 in Europe. The offer is not limited to games retailers such as GameStop, Amazon and GoGamer. Details on how the offer will work in Europe have not been released by Electronic Arts.
It seems that the 10 dollars off offer is limited to pre-orders made through retailers and does not apply to purchases made through the electronic store that EA maintains. On the other hand, the people who make the pre-order online will also benefit from some goodies, in the form of the first issue of the Dead Space comic book and of a wall sized Dead Space poster. The items are limited in number so hurry if you want these pieces of memorabilia. Read the rest of this entry »
No, it’s not a get rich quick scheme by a company manufacturing lens cleaning tissues, but an idea for future camera technology from the brainy folk at Stanford University. A team led by Professor Abbas El Gamal are working on a camera with a multi-aperture image sensor. This is basically an image sensor with super-small pixels – several times smaller than the pixels on a regular camera. They are clustered together on the sensor chip in groups of 256 pixels, and each group has its own micro lens. It is like having a lot of cameras on a single chip; in effect the 3-megapixel chip the researchers are working on is equivalent to 12,616 separate cameras.
So far so good, but the really clever bit is that by selectively defocusing images captured by the cameras, the data can be processed to produce detailed 3D image maps of whatever it happens to be pointing at. Read the rest of this entry »
A one-way mirror is basically just like any other mirror, just that it has the ability of reflecting light on one side while on the other, it is transparent. Typical mirrors achieve a high degree of reflectiveness on one side, leaving the reverse opaque to optical light. This is done by covering the glass layer with a silvered coating. One-way mirrors, however, use half silvered surfaces in order to achieve a balance between reflectiveness and transparency, in combination with carefully adjusted amounts of light.
