INDN 311: Glass Lensing

To create the new lens, I looked online first. I know that lenses are exceedingly hard to make unless you have an extensive set of tools and expertise. I was tempted to use the skills available to me through the glass blower again, but I thought that that might end up being too expensive (especially since I had already spent a fair amount on the project thus far).

An initial idea that I settled on was to use a convex lens, since this would seek to magnify the output of light, most likely flipping the orientation of the image before it reached the ceiling. Thus, I decided to scrap the notion of having it project a more defined image onto the ceiling. Now I just want to make the phone abstractly project colour washes and slight movement onto the ceiling, in order to create ambient "mood" lighting.

I found this concave lens on the internet for very little money. The reason I'm not looking at convex lenses is so that I can actually disperse the light from the screen further. The resultant effect I want to achieve involves not focussing the light, ergo why I decided a concave lens would work better. The spread of the light would enable the iPhone to provide a larger coverage area.

To minimise vibrations from the phone transmitting to the table in the form of noise, the user can place down the wool mat, intended to provide juxtaposition with the pure and clean form of the phone and lens. I actually went back and re-cut the wool mat, as the first version of it just wasn't the best size. It was a little bit too minimal and not particularly generous.

One of the problems with laser cutting the wool is that it ends up stinking, due to the burnt wool and the burnt oils that are present in wool. And I mean you can't go within two meters of the darn thing without getting a bad stench from it. To resolve this I've used washing powder and then washed it by hand in a sink with cold water, in order to prevent shrinking. Interestingly it ended up stretching, but this pretty much ended up mostly being due to the fact that I was washing it in quite an aggressive way, squeezing and squashing the wool mat.