MC Ecsher - Hand with Reflecting Sphere - Now a Quicktime VR Movie!

99% of the internet world knows who MC Escher is, if only because of things like Crazy Stairs.

One of his other well-known works is Hand with Reflecting Sphere, where the image is one of a hand holding a mirrorball where the artist is shown drawing himself. It’s a nifty bit of work, but it also allows us a rather unique perspective using modern tools. You see, there’s a cool thing about mirrorballs and that is that they display nearly 360 degrees of (distorted) information around them. The only information completely lost is the space directly behind the ball. Everything else is represented, though things get a little dicey towards the edges.

Anyways, it’s possible using “modern panoramic tools” to extract the scene captured by a mirrorball and represent it as either a Virtual Reality movie or a flat image. So, combining the former (Escher drawing of a mirrorball) with the latter (panoramic software), we should be able to make a VR movie of Escher’s office, right? Right!

• Quicktime VR movie of Escher’s office

As you can see, because of the ‘drawn’ nature of things, the world gets more than a little fuzzy at the back edges – right where the mirrorball is held and where most visual information gets compressed down into elongated distorted chunks. But on the whole, hey, it came out pretty well. Man knew his stuff.

Due to the vagaries of US Copyright Law, I’m pretty sure that this page will not last forever, but it will have been fun while it lasted.