Zazaziza

The first exploration in the Somethingscopes series is the Polaroid flower, a mechanism of gears, rubber bands and a USB-powered motor that makes spin a circular arrangement of Polaroid filters.

The Polaroid flower is based on the principle that light, as a transverse electromagnetic wave, can be polarised, that is, instead of having it going in all directions, there are ways of making it disperse in only one direction. Polarisation is also the principle behind LCD screens, which means that this kind of screens use Polaroid filters in order to make the liquid crystal arrange visible.

So, what happens when a series of Polaroid filters overlap? the answer is that they further filter down lightwaves depending on their rotation, and in certain combinations they can filter specific frequencies (colours).

When an observer uses polariser lenses oriented perpendicularly to the direction of the light coming from the screen, that light is blocked; however, if between the screen and the polariser lenses there are additional filters oriented at different angles, the overall blocking effect of the polariser lenses can be cancelled out in specific areas.

Hopefully, some of the above will make more sense after watching the video below. The next step for the Polaroid flower is to make it augment or react to what is happening on the screen.