Infinity Table v1.0 Project Decription and Gallery
An infinity mirror is created by sandwiching some lights in between the reflective side of a one-way-mirror and the reflective side of a traditional mirror. The two mirrored surfaces reflect the light back and forth between one another creating the appearance of infinite depth. By using a one-way-mirror, some light is allowed to escape enabling a spectator to view the effect. Because some of the light is allowed to escape and some is also absorbed by the non-reflective surfaces between the sandwich, the effect does not persist into infinity. For this reason it is extremely important to use a very high quality one-way-mirror (as opposed to say, car tint on a piece of clear glass) as it will make the illusion depth appear to be much greater. It is also important to use the brightest LEDs you can find, because the one-way-mirror substantially cuts down on the amount of light allowed to escape, dimming the brightness of LEDs as if you were wearing sunglasses.
This project was a joint effort between my Dad and myself (and a few errant friends toward the end) as there was a lot that had to be done. The wood is actually from an old bookshelf that my Mom and Dad bought for my apartment during school. It was $10 and made from solid oak, so the lumber alone made that shelf a good investment. The shelf was stained and had to be completely resurfaced before we could cut it down, and stick it all back together as a coffee table. Everything uses pocket screw so that there are no exposed screw heads and the table has 6 layer of polyurethane coating the surface (4 regular fast dry poly and 2 spar to protect the wood from UV and moisture).
The LEDs are APA102 based and were purchased from Pololu electronics. These particular LEDs are the highest-density APA102s that I am aware of on the market at 144 LEDs per meter. However they are only sold in half-meter strips due to voltage drop across the strip (yes, they are super super bright), which means you have to put a bunch of strips together and then power each one individually to prevent the color from becoming increasingly red. At the moment, the LEDs are driven by an Arduino UNO via standard SPI, though I plan to swap that out for a Raspberry Pi any day now. The Pi will let me do really cool things like slice up images and use them as a bit stream of colors to the LEDs (if that makes no sense watch this video to get an idea of what I mean).
Here is quick view of the finished product:
Here are some videos of the table in action:
Infinity Table Running In the Living Room from Tyler Springer on Vimeo.
Infinity Table Running Before Urethane from Tyler Springer on Vimeo.
First look at the LEDs and Mirror from Tyler Springer on Vimeo.
Quick test fit of the LEDs and the mirrors from Tyler Springer on Vimeo.
Playing with the spacing on the LEDs from Tyler Springer on Vimeo.
Annnnnd here is the table being built over the course of probably about 6 months, as we had time:
