The Final Project

The Dorian Gray Mirror

Mikaela Kurtson Bellman Anna Kvernplassen Cecilia Thorsén Mattias Larsson Joakim Lööv

In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray stays young and fresh while his portrait grows aged and corrupt. The portrait ages in his stead. Our version of the Dorian Gray Mirror will let you see yourself through old eyes.

The final project

The most common eye disease caused by ageing is cataract. Cataract is a increase of opacity in the lense of the eye. As the lense gets less opaque, you loose contrast and your vision gets blurred. The light that enters an eye with cataract will disperse, and as a result you get halo effects around light sources. Yet another consequence is that you easily get blinded by bright light.

A natural part of ageing is that the lense turns yellow, and will thus act as a yellow filter. The brain compensates for this so you will never notice that your vision has become more yellow, but as a result you will loose valuable color information.

Our Dorian Gray Mirror acts as an aged eye with cataract.You will notice the lack of contrast and yellow image, since there is no brain to balance the image, as well as the blurred impression.

Background

In our first assignment we discussed money as a human companion through the ages. We considered both the appearence and the value of money.

Our second presentation was more spot on. We compared the ageing of a simple rubber band to the lense of the eye. We then focused on the aging of the eye, which led us to our final project.

Memories

Almost there

Leif Handberg has been a great help for us. We got to borrow his half-mirror thing..that he uses in one of his courses here on KTH. Thank you so much, Leif!

So, here we go. We're using this half-mirror construction and because of that, we have solved the problem about the invisible camera. Now you won't be able to see the camera through the mirror and you will see yourself in the picture, as in a mirror. We have also found a way of hiding this, quite big, construction. The cover is a wood construction which we have installed lightbulbs in (covers the front) and some black fabric that we are going to cover the back with. This will also strengthen the effect that you get more sensitive to bright light when you grow old.

To make this great front cover, we bought wood, lightbulbs, and material to install them. After some serious handicraft by our group members, building and painting, it looks really good.

Joakim has finally found a program that we can use for simulating these filters we're going to use! Thank you so much for that, Jocke! With some work with this program, we finally found the right filters to use for the right impression of the picture.

Whihoo!

Progress

Yesterday we were kinda stuck in the beginning of the day, but we didn´t let the mood gets to us.
So we started to make phonecalls to found out if some of our teachers had some ideas and materials that could help us.
And finally Leif Handberg answer and he told us that when they are working on their ongoing project, were they use i method similar to what we wants to do. And today when we called him he was just about to fix some things for us and we are going to meet him in an hour to see what he has found for us.
Leif also told us to give Anders Friberg a call, and we did.
We asked him if he knew a program that could be used in our project to put layers in realtime production. And we found one, but it didnt work exactly the way we wanted so Joakim was up all night to find the right one.

We have also make some thoughts about the construction, but we are still thinking...
We are planning to use two regular mirror to project the image on the right spot and a second mirror for the image to project to image on.
The problem we have is were to put the camera and the projector. But we will figure it out, just wait.

So at the moment we are in a working process and will probably be for the rest of the day.

And so on..

Now we have actually decided which idea we will proceed with. After the presentation last friday we were quite confident that this idea will work and that we will be able to present it in a good way. We chose the idea "The Dorian Gray mirror". But we will not be able to show a mirror image where the person looks "aged" in the sense that he or she has wrinkles and gray hair. Instead, we will show a mirror image of the person who stands in front of the "mirror" as an old photograph. The image will be more yellow, have less contrast, be more bright and have some blurry texture to it.

We are going to use a camera, a projector, a computer and different filters. Probably something else too, but now we have just started to experiment with these things. Hopefully we will find a way to hide the camera and projector so it really will look like a "real" mirror. We have contacted some professors on KTH that we thought could help us with this project. We have got some answers but the most help we have got so far is from the people at AMT that we borrow the material from.

We still have some problems but hopefully we'll be able to solve them in time for the exhibition.

Thoughts

We have some idéas on how to approach the problem. Water has come to be one of our favourite subjects. You can use water as a lense, to create refraction, but also to create effects with color. You can put lenses and other things that bend light into the water and get interesting results.

A way to emphasize contrast could be to project light through bars (or any shape) on a picture, so that only some areas become brighter. This would give the image an artificial contrast. It would show the difference between enlightened and darker areas, and thus create contrast.

You could also transpose the ageing of light to sound, which wouldn't give exactly the same result as the ageing of sound itself.

After talking to Antonio today we decided to look att ageing through a camera. We've tried to recreate age diseases as catarct by putting different pieces of plastic in front of the camera. You can actually get decent results when it comes to halo effects and generally blurred vision. The problem is, while working with plastics, there is no way to reverse the aging effects without using photoshop. And even if we used photoshop, we wouldn't be able to recreate the original image, although we could probably enhance it somewhat. We might be a bit stuck again, since the experiment gave no clear results. We would have liked to use lenses instead, to be able to reverse the damage made from other lenses. This would have given us the opportunity to take pictures both with the damaging lense, both of the lenses (damaging and correcting, which would have given an ok image), and only the correcting lense. Both of the lenses alone would give a "wrong" picture. Although the correcting lense alone would make it right, in a way. Confused? Yeah, we're not really clear about that concept eithter.

Something else we've learned is that when stuck, it's best to take a couple of steps back, and start working again. If you don't do this, you only increases the frustration.

The ideas

We would like to present our ideas that we have come up with so far:

1. We thought about using a laser which we would send through and to different objects for reflection and effects from "filters". This would "destroy" the laser and in the end it would be less bright and not as sharp as in the beginning. This would resemble the ageing of the eye. The objects that we would use for this would be different things that we use through our lives, a part of our ageing.

2. The aged eye. We thought we would build a dark room and project a picture on one wall. The picture is "destroyed" with different filters to make the illusion that the picture is seen through an old eye. This would show how destroyed the picture is when it reaches the cornea.

3. The intellectual white balance. We would change the expression of known pictures, like well known logos from big companies; Mc Donalds or Coca Cola for example. We would change the expression by changeing the light and destroy the picture with different filters. The question here is, can we achieve an ageing effect by changeing only the lights?

4. A light room, insread of a dark room. This idea is about making the room so bright light that you can't see the contrasts or the colors in the pictures we would have in there. This would also change the whole expression of the picture. We want to show how easily you can get dazzled by bright light when you grow old.

We are thinking about these ideas but we are still open for new ones.

The Process

We started out with a presentation about money and tried to relate money to ageing. But we thought this was quite hard and we didn't get anywhere with it so we changed our object instead. Our last presentation, as some of you know, was about the eye. More precise, about the lens of the eye, and the rubber band as a metaphor for it. We are now focusing on the ageing of the eye and what kind of problems elderly people have with their sight. Some of the problems we have talked about is:

Katarakt (grå starr) which means that your lens is getting "blurry". It can bring that you can't see contrasts as before. Your eyes get more sensitive to bright light. You can't see as clearly in the dark as before. You have a problem seeing colors as they are supposed to look and you can get a problem with seeing "double". To decide the distance between different things can alsto be a problem.

Glaukom (grön starr) which is a damage to the nerve in the eye. It is caused by a change of the preassure in the eye. It can make your eyesight more blurry and you can get difficulties in your field of vision.

Makula (the yellow spot, gula fläcken) is also affected by our age and that we grow old. The yellow spot is the spot where the cells are closest togehter and that's where we see with the best sharpness.

With this information and basic information about how the eye works, we decided to focus on color and brightness. Both color and brightness are affected by ageing and we thought that we maybe could do something fun and interesting with that.