Kaleidoscope Goggles
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In the last half of my final semester in college, the COVID-19 pandemic struck and students were forced to finish the semester remotely. This felt particularly difficult for a tightly-knit community like Olin, a group of people who regularly bond around making things. How can we continue to foster meaningful education and project experience through hands-on learning, despite being confined to our own houses? I was determined to answer that question. That semester, I was taking a class called Change the World, the requisite course for graduating as a Grand Challenges Scholar. The final project for the class was the Personal Vision and Mission, comprised of a written statement and a creative expression piece. I saw the creative expression piece as a means to not only produce something cool despite working from home, but also to create something representative of myself. The result was the Kaleidoscope Goggles. See the slideshow below for more photos and renderings, check out a POV video, or read the full artist's statement below.
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The completed Kaleidoscope Goggles
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Artist's Statement:
A reflection...
I have fond memories in my childhood of going to visit my great-grandma in Oklahoma City. Her quaint little condo always seemed to have an endless supply of weird little toys, knick-knacks, or relics from decades past. “Oh, you like that? Why don’t you take it home with you!” she’d inevitably offer about whatever I picked up, her generous spirit ever-present. The best toy by far, though, was her kaleidoscope, and it was the one thing I wasn’t allowed to take home. The robust plastic tube with a faded blue-and-green wave pattern always sat on the shelf behind her recliner downstairs, and it always seemed to call to me. I’d hold it up to the lamp and peer through the tiny hole in the top, turning it round and round for what seemed like hours on end. It was like I was transported to another dimension altogether. I could physically control the experience, yet each turn presented a new surprise. Sometimes, I’d forget to revel in the beauty of a particularly captivating turn, and then try in vain to restore it after the curiosity of another turn pushed it away. While I’ve always loved appreciating the natural wonder of the world, sometimes I’ve found that the most compelling sights are the ones that shift your perspective entirely. There was nothing in the real world that looked like the inside of that kaleidoscope, and so I was perpetually drawn to it.
Why make this?
I’ve thought a lot in this class about the kinds of experiences that stand out to me the most, and the traits I value in myself and in others. I’ve always loved experiences that seem to transport me to other dimensions entirely, where I can become totally immersed in a different world. The intersection of engineering and art has always fascinated me, and it’s one I haven’t gotten to explore as much as I’d like. I see that realm as an opportunity to create experiences that can shift someone’s perspective on the world, or make them feel included or immersed in an experience. Enter the kaleidoscope goggles. The experience is simple: insert your phone into the base of the headset, queue up a cool video, and sit back and enjoy the show. The inside of the headset is lined with mirrors at all angles, reflecting and scattering the video source from the phone and creating an otherworldly immersive kaleidoscopic experience.
What does it represent?
My primary goal going into this project was to try to make an immersive experience. At the same time, I wanted to create something that reflects my own worldview and self-perspective. There are so many facets to my identity that sometimes seem at odds with one another, and that can make it difficult for me to reflect on my entire self holistically. As a result, my sense of self is sometimes fragmented. Different traits emerge at different times, and I find myself feeling like a totally different person depending on the context or environment I’m in. The images seen in the kaleidoscope all stem from a single source—you can sometimes see bits and pieces come together to form parts of the whole, but the collective image remains disjointed.
I also see the kaleidoscope goggles as a representation of open-mindedness. I personally value when people and communities are willing to shift their perspectives, or amalgamate the vast perspectives of others to view complex problems. I like to imagine each individual mirror facet as a unique perspective on the world. It’s certainly not reflective of the entire thing, and it might represent all that individual has ever been exposed to. Most importantly, though, it holds a different reflection from your own, a different angle, a different outlook on the world. When we can incorporate lots of different perspectives into the way we view the world, we augment our own realities and get a clearer sense of the whole human experience. It might still look fragmented, but looking closely enough can reveal common threads that unite us.
What’s next?
Just before my great-grandma passed, I laid claim to the kaleidoscope and brought it back home with me. While I still enjoyed looking in it every now and then, it seemed to lose a little bit of its awe now that I could access its realm whenever I wanted. I want to spend some time with my kaleidoscope goggles and appreciate what they have to offer, but ultimately, they should find a new home where more people can appreciate the experience it has to offer. Maybe they could find a home in Olin’s library, where our community can experience its mirrored dimensions from their own perspectives.
How is it made?
I thought that the best way to create a 360° hall-of-mirrors effect would be a geodesic sphere. The geometry of a single 60-sided geodesic sphere (pentagonal pyramids constructed around a dodecahedron) wasn’t quite wide enough to fit my phone at a reasonable scale, so I split the shape and joined the two mirrored halves. Once I had my overall shape, I cut off the bottom faces to make a space for my phone to attach. Then, I made some pentagonal and hexagonal caps that would connect all of the parts together. One benefit of a geodesic dome is that each triangular facet is the same shape; however, joining two halves created some funky diamonds and trapezoids that I had to figure out how to connect to one another.
I was able to print all of the 3D-printable parts on my own printer, a Flashforge Creator Pro. There were 41 individual 3D-printed parts that collectively took about 48 hours to print, and 69 individual laser cut parts. Each laser cut facet was traced out onto adhesive mirror sheets. I cut out each of these mirrors with a hobby knife and a paper cutter and then adhered them onto the respective pieces. I first built pentagonal sections separately by supergluing the wooden facets to the 3D-printed caps, and then I combined these sections together to gradually form the entire shape. Finally, I embedded some small magnets into the face shield components and some of the panels to make a magnetically detachable visor piece. I estimate that I put in around 10 hours designing the piece, 48 hours (mostly passively) 3D printing parts, and around 18 hours assembling. The project was certainly an investment of time and a test of my quarantine ingenuity, but I think it paid off as one of my coolest design projects ever.
I have fond memories in my childhood of going to visit my great-grandma in Oklahoma City. Her quaint little condo always seemed to have an endless supply of weird little toys, knick-knacks, or relics from decades past. “Oh, you like that? Why don’t you take it home with you!” she’d inevitably offer about whatever I picked up, her generous spirit ever-present. The best toy by far, though, was her kaleidoscope, and it was the one thing I wasn’t allowed to take home. The robust plastic tube with a faded blue-and-green wave pattern always sat on the shelf behind her recliner downstairs, and it always seemed to call to me. I’d hold it up to the lamp and peer through the tiny hole in the top, turning it round and round for what seemed like hours on end. It was like I was transported to another dimension altogether. I could physically control the experience, yet each turn presented a new surprise. Sometimes, I’d forget to revel in the beauty of a particularly captivating turn, and then try in vain to restore it after the curiosity of another turn pushed it away. While I’ve always loved appreciating the natural wonder of the world, sometimes I’ve found that the most compelling sights are the ones that shift your perspective entirely. There was nothing in the real world that looked like the inside of that kaleidoscope, and so I was perpetually drawn to it.
Why make this?
I’ve thought a lot in this class about the kinds of experiences that stand out to me the most, and the traits I value in myself and in others. I’ve always loved experiences that seem to transport me to other dimensions entirely, where I can become totally immersed in a different world. The intersection of engineering and art has always fascinated me, and it’s one I haven’t gotten to explore as much as I’d like. I see that realm as an opportunity to create experiences that can shift someone’s perspective on the world, or make them feel included or immersed in an experience. Enter the kaleidoscope goggles. The experience is simple: insert your phone into the base of the headset, queue up a cool video, and sit back and enjoy the show. The inside of the headset is lined with mirrors at all angles, reflecting and scattering the video source from the phone and creating an otherworldly immersive kaleidoscopic experience.
What does it represent?
My primary goal going into this project was to try to make an immersive experience. At the same time, I wanted to create something that reflects my own worldview and self-perspective. There are so many facets to my identity that sometimes seem at odds with one another, and that can make it difficult for me to reflect on my entire self holistically. As a result, my sense of self is sometimes fragmented. Different traits emerge at different times, and I find myself feeling like a totally different person depending on the context or environment I’m in. The images seen in the kaleidoscope all stem from a single source—you can sometimes see bits and pieces come together to form parts of the whole, but the collective image remains disjointed.
I also see the kaleidoscope goggles as a representation of open-mindedness. I personally value when people and communities are willing to shift their perspectives, or amalgamate the vast perspectives of others to view complex problems. I like to imagine each individual mirror facet as a unique perspective on the world. It’s certainly not reflective of the entire thing, and it might represent all that individual has ever been exposed to. Most importantly, though, it holds a different reflection from your own, a different angle, a different outlook on the world. When we can incorporate lots of different perspectives into the way we view the world, we augment our own realities and get a clearer sense of the whole human experience. It might still look fragmented, but looking closely enough can reveal common threads that unite us.
What’s next?
Just before my great-grandma passed, I laid claim to the kaleidoscope and brought it back home with me. While I still enjoyed looking in it every now and then, it seemed to lose a little bit of its awe now that I could access its realm whenever I wanted. I want to spend some time with my kaleidoscope goggles and appreciate what they have to offer, but ultimately, they should find a new home where more people can appreciate the experience it has to offer. Maybe they could find a home in Olin’s library, where our community can experience its mirrored dimensions from their own perspectives.
How is it made?
I thought that the best way to create a 360° hall-of-mirrors effect would be a geodesic sphere. The geometry of a single 60-sided geodesic sphere (pentagonal pyramids constructed around a dodecahedron) wasn’t quite wide enough to fit my phone at a reasonable scale, so I split the shape and joined the two mirrored halves. Once I had my overall shape, I cut off the bottom faces to make a space for my phone to attach. Then, I made some pentagonal and hexagonal caps that would connect all of the parts together. One benefit of a geodesic dome is that each triangular facet is the same shape; however, joining two halves created some funky diamonds and trapezoids that I had to figure out how to connect to one another.
I was able to print all of the 3D-printable parts on my own printer, a Flashforge Creator Pro. There were 41 individual 3D-printed parts that collectively took about 48 hours to print, and 69 individual laser cut parts. Each laser cut facet was traced out onto adhesive mirror sheets. I cut out each of these mirrors with a hobby knife and a paper cutter and then adhered them onto the respective pieces. I first built pentagonal sections separately by supergluing the wooden facets to the 3D-printed caps, and then I combined these sections together to gradually form the entire shape. Finally, I embedded some small magnets into the face shield components and some of the panels to make a magnetically detachable visor piece. I estimate that I put in around 10 hours designing the piece, 48 hours (mostly passively) 3D printing parts, and around 18 hours assembling. The project was certainly an investment of time and a test of my quarantine ingenuity, but I think it paid off as one of my coolest design projects ever.