Design Realization

lecture 25
John Canny
11/20/03

Last time
Improvisation: application to circuits and realtime programming.
Optics: physics of light.

This time

Reflection, Scattering
Refraction, TIR
Retro-reflection
Lenses

Wavefronts and Rays

EM waves propagate normal to the wavefront
surface, and vice-versa.
The ray description is most useful for
describing the geometry of images.

Reflection
Most metals are excellent conductors.
They reduce the E field to zero at the surface,
causing reflection.
If I, R, N unit vectors:
IN = RN
I(N R) = 0

Ray-tracing
By tracing rays back from the viewer, we can
estimate what a reflected object would look like.
Follow at least two rays at extremes of the
object.

Lambertian scattering
For most non-metallic objects, the apparent
brightness depends on surface orientation
relative to the light source but not the
viewer.
i.e. brightness is
proportional to IN

Refraction wave representation

In transparent materials (plastic, glass), light
propagates slower than in air.
At the boundary, wavefronts bend:

Refractive index
Refractive index measures how fast light
propagates through a medium.
Such media must be poor conductors and are
usually called dielectric media.
The refractive index of a dielectric medium is

where c is the speed of light in vacuum, and v

is the speed in the medium. Note that > 1.

Refraction Snells law

Incident and refracted rays satisfy:

i sin i r sin r

Refraction ray representation

In terms of rays, light bends toward the normal
in the slower material.

Refraction in triangular prisms

For most media, refractive index varies with
wavelength. This gives the familiar rainbow
spectrum with white light in glass or water.

Refractive index
Refractive index as a function of wavelength for
glass

and

water

Refractive index
High-quality optical glass is engineered to have
a constant refractive index across the visible
spectrum.
Deviations are still possible. Such deviations are
called chromatic aberration.

Refractive indices

Water is approximately 1.33

Normal glass and acrylic plastic is about 1.5
Polycarbonate is about 1.56
Highest optical plastic index is 1.66
Bismuth glass is over 2
Diamond is 2.42

Internal reflection
Across a refractive index drop, there is an
angle beyond which ray exit is impossible:

Total internal reflection (TIR)

The critical angle is where the refracted ray
would have 90 incidence.
The internal reflection angle is therefore:

T arcsin 1 /
For glass/acrylic, this is 42
For diamond, it is 24 - light will make many
internal reflections before leaving, creating the
fire in the diamond.

Penta-prisms
Penta-prisms are used in SLR cameras to
rotate an image without inverting it.
They are equivalent to two conventional
mirrors, and cause a 90 rotation of the
image, without inversion.
An even number of
mirrors produce a noninverted rotated image
of the object.

Retro-reflection: Corner
reflectors
In 2D, two mirrors at right angles will retroreflect light rays, i.e. send them back in the
direction they came from.

Retro-reflection: Corner
reflectors
In 3D, you need 3 mirrors to do this:

Analysis: each mirror inverts one of X,Y,Z

Retro-reflection: TIR spheres

Consider a sphere and an incoming ray.
Incoming and refracted ray angles are , .
For the ray to hit the centerline, = 2.
For retro-reflection, we
want = sin /sin

For small angles, = 2

gives good results.

Retro-reflective sheets
Inexpensive retro-reflective tapes are available
that use tiny corner reflectors or spheres
embedded in clear plastic (3M Scotchlite)
They come in many colors, including black.

Retro-reflector gain
The retro-reflection response of a screen is
normally rated in terms of gain.
Gain = ratio of peak reflected light energy to
the energy reflected by a Lambertian surface.
Gains may be 1000 or more.
Light source only needs 1/1000 of the light
energy to illuminate the screen, as long as the
viewer is close enough to the source.

Application: personal displays

Each user has a personal projector (e.g. a
PDA with a single lens in front of it), and
projects on the same retro-reflective screen.

Application: Artificial
backgrounds
Projector and camera along same optical axis,
project scene onto actors and retro-reflective
background.
Cameras sees background only on screen, not
on the actors (3M received technical academy
award for this in 1985).

Convex Lenses
A refractive disk with one or two convex
spherical surfaces converges parallel light rays
almost to a point.
The distance to this point is the focal length of
the lens.

Lenses
If light comes from a point source that is
further away than the focal length, it will focus
to another point on the other side.

Lenses
When there are two focal points f1 , f2
(sometimes called conjugates), then they
satisfy:

1 1 1

f f1 f 2

Spherical Lenses
If the lens consists of spherical surfaces with
radii r1 and r2, then the focal length satisfies
1/f = ( - 1) (1/r1 - 1/r2)

Spherical aberration
Spherical lenses cannot achieve perfect focus,
and always have some aberration:

Spherical aberration
Compound lenses, comprising convex,
concave or hybrid elements, are used to
minimize aberration.