Get the latest tech news
The Physics of Magic Windows (2021)
I recently made a physical object that defies all intuition. It's a square of acrylic, smooth on both sides, totally transparent...
If you aren't familiar with it, just think of this step like inverting a big matrix, or numerically integrating an ODE, or finding the square root of a real number. Using Snell's Law, a small angle approximation, and a lot of tedious geometry, we find the x and y components of the normal vector \vec{N}: The original paper suggests a better way of calculating loss but I didn't implement it because the naive way was easier, yet I rolled my own mesh utilities and Poisson solver because I enjoyed the challenge.
Or read this on Hacker News
