Make a Pseudoscope (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Make a Pseudoscope (2005)

pseudoscope.blogspot.com

89 pointsmattbierner27 comments

I was always wondering, why don't we have periscope windows?

What I imagine is a "light intake" on a roof, from which the light is concentrated into a straight long NARROW tube that takes it to an underground flat where the light is dispersed into a fake window.

Is such design not possible mathematically or just very expensive?

Maybe it could use Fresnel lenses to save on cost and weight. That way we would not get a clear picture of the outside world but at least lot of natural daylight.

I live in a 3-storey apartment building, and one of my neighbours downstairs actually has this. It's actually a bit of a sneaky marketing "hack" by the architects.

When the building was being designed a couple of years ago, they put a light tunnel in place running down the vertical length of one side of the building. This took light from the penthouse's roof and channeled it down to the ground floor.

By doing this, the architects could turn a 2-bedroom apartment into a 3-bedroom one. By law (at least in the UK), you cannot market a room as a bedroom unless it has natural light coming in. As my neighbour's apartment was surrounded on two sides by adjoining walls, this meant a room mid-way through the length of the building (and otherwise devoid of natural light) could be considered a bedroom, and marketed as such.

> It's actually a bit of a sneaky marketing "hack" by the architects.

> By doing this, the architects could turn a 2-bedroom apartment into a 3-bedroom one. By law (at least in the UK), you cannot market a room as a bedroom unless it has natural light coming in.

This doesn't sound right to me, so I checked and the best I can come up with is this, from the building regulations:

https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/200130/common_projects...

There is reference to fire escape/egress and to ventilation but nothing about natural light. I don't think there is any requirement to have natural light for a room to be defined as a bedroom.

The subject of what a bedroom actually is appears to be somewhat murky. The Building Regulations use terms like "habitable space" for most rooms within a house which I assume allows for the fact that one persons front room/lounge/living room might be another persons ground floor bedroom/granny annex/lodger's bedsit. There are some specific cases such as kitchens and bathrooms that don't tend to be as ambiguous, but I don't think there is a regulation that backs up your statement "By law (at least in the UK), you cannot market a room as a bedroom unless it has natural light coming in."

http://www.rics.org/uk/knowledge/glossary/what-is-a-bedroom/

I don't know for the UK, but there is a similar limitation in Japan. An habitation room must have a window, which meant our house was a 2 bedroom + 1 utility room, and not 3 bedrooms.

I don't have the source of the requirement, just that it was specified in the contract, and we got an explanation as to why the third room was not deemed fit for habitation.

My understanding is that it's because of what the GP cited - there needs to be an alternate way to escape the room in the event of a fire/flood/etc.

A friend of a friend drowned because they were asleep in a "bedroom" which was a room in a lower level without a window.

The tubes are not that narrow, but Velux makes "sun tunnels" to bring natural light inside buildings :

https://www.velux.com/products/sun-tunnels

Cool idea, this seems to be called a light/sun tunnel and uses a refractive dome to capture light:

https://www.sterlingbuild.co.uk/info/5-things-you-need-to-kn...

I think I have read about some similar setup using optical fibers.

You might find this web page interesting: https://forgottenchicago.com/features/chicagos-glass-block-p...

You mean a light tube? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_tube

I think they're uncommon because electric lighting is fairly cheap to run, and there are practical issues with running a big light tube through the house.

There's even a Swedish company doing it with fiber optics: https://www.parans.com/

Their website claims they can get sunlight 30 floors down.

Nowadays Fresnel Lens to fiber Glass cables are sold

I recall reading something about periscope windows years ago in a book about the University of Minnesota's centre for underground buildings. It was said that looking through the periscope window from underground resembled watching a live diorama in an aquarium. I imagined something like a tilt-shift movie. Ever since reading that description, I have always wanted to see a real periscope window.

Found it: it was called an ectascope and there are diagrams here:

https://www.minnpost.com/stroll/2015/09/seven-stories-down-u...

Not a very good photo of what it looked like:

http://blogimg.goo.ne.jp/user_image/6e/29/0553c64f5a894a9391...

I achieved a presumably similar effect several years ago by viewing my 3D TV (remember those?) with the 3D glasses on upside down. It is definitely very strange having “near” and “far” effectively reversed, yet with all the other depth cues in place.

Great idea, I ought to try that too! Now where did I stow away these glasses... and where do I find a 3D movie... :-)

A more comfortable way to achieve this is just set the 3D mode to the wrong setting (eg. R|L side-by-side instead of L|R, or under/over instead of over/under). Agreed that it's a really weird feeling, almost like having something brushing your face.

(Also, it makes me sad that 3D is no longer a feature of new TVs. I guess I'm just going to have to hold onto the one we've got - I like watching 3D movies even if no-one else in the house does!)

Basically rich people version of cross-eyed viewing of the stereogram which was set up for diverged viewing.

> A pseudoscope is an optical instrument made with two prisms. As seen in the drawing, the mirrors reverse the image in each eye causing some items viewed through it to look quite unusual: convex objects become concave, things pointing towards you may look like they are pointing away and vice versa.

— https://pseudoscope.blogspot.com/2005/06/pseudoscope-is-opti...

Might be popular with flat-earthers ;-) ... the psychological phenomenon might even be related

If I am not mistaken, this homemade pseudoscope works on a slightly different principle - it switches the perspective from which each eye sees the object, without any left-right reversal. The two-prism device appears to preserve the perspective of each eye but does a left-right reversal of the images on each retina (I confirmed the non- left-right reversal in the mirror case with a pair of hand-held mirrors.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscope#/media/File:Pseudo...

What's the name of an optical device like this that merely magnifies the stereo separation without crossing the images? I see examples of photographs taken this way but not real-time viewing instruments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo_photography_techniques#...

Look at old battleship rangefinders. Some of them had 8 or 9 metre baselines.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_rangefinder#Stereo...

Has someone built a virtual pseudoscope for virtual reality goggles such as Oculus Go?

This illusion should be relatively easy to implement as a scene in VR.

Title should be:

  Make a Pseudoscope (2005)

I mean, does knowing it was written in 2005 change how you read it? Titles only really need years if the context is important, and AFAIK the physics of prisms haven't changed all that much in 13 years.

It also helps readers to know if they've read the article before.

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