Light

◎ Travels is an fun story that depicts Gulliver’s interesting adventures in his travels around the world.

Lilliput：
The author looks down from above with the eyes of a giant, gazing at how small and ridiculous humans are.
Brobdingnag：
The author views the world from the perspective of a dwarf, gazing up at the vulgarity and heartlessness of humans......

◎ Game Experience :

Try and find 2 children with the same height, body type, and see if there’s a difference in their height when they go through the hallway. Let’s experiment and observe together!

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Kids, do you know how shadows are created? What are the differences between daytime and nighttime? If one day your shadow stops following you and is stuck on a wall, don’t be scared because it may be a phosphorescence wall.

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The Wall of Shadow in the park’s Optical House contains “phosphorescence material”. When the wall receives light, the wall will absorb energy and slowly release it in the absence of light; the portion that’s blocked by people doesn’t absorb light and forms a shadow, which is why our shadow is stuck on the wall. Isn’t optical magic amazing?

The size of objects is related to the perspective of our eyes; the bigger the perspective, the bigger the object. For instance, utility poles at the end of the freeway look like thin strips; on the other hand, when you hold your thumb close to your eye, it looks big enough to block a mountain. This is the principle of the See-Through Room.

Have you ever seen water flow upwards? That is the power of gravity that creates a dissonance in your visual nerves. Whether it’s the tilted house’s pool table or Dali Garden’s water flowing upwards, if you look into the house and compare it to its horizontal position, you’ll find that whether it’s the height of the table or water, their true horizontal position is still lower than the lowest point. That’s what creates this weird phenomenon. 

Light reflects in mirrors to create virtual images. If light is reflected between 2 angled mirrors, they produce countless images. If you divide 360 degrees by the angle and minus 1, that’s the number of images in the mirror.

The curved mirror causes the “reflection and focus” of irregular light resulting in scattered images. Differences in the mirror’s curves will result in different effects; the 4 common morph effects are tall, short, fat, and skinny.

Op art is “visual art” that is calculated. It uses bright colors to create a quivering effect to achieve visual excitement Op art is also known as optical or visual art and after it appeared in Europe in the 1960’s, it gained popularity in the U.S. as a type of art that utilizes optical principles with improved painting effects. Op art is usually done with abstract geometric shapes and gradients of light, dark, and colors to create visual illusions.

Vasarely was a French artist born in Hungary. He was the pioneer and representative figure of op art; his pieces are often seen when talking about the theories and characteristics of op art.

This is Taiwan’s largest sundial that displays using 3 types of shadow using horizontal, vertical, and cylindrical surfaces.

As Earth is affected by rotation and revolution, daylight projection differs according to season resulting in time differences. Through the sun’s daylight, the shadow of the slanted board in the middle will read the time; as the globally accepted standard time separates each time zone by 15 longitude (180 longitude/12 hours) so the time displayed on the sundial with this region’s time difference added is what we normally call Chungyuan Standard Time (CST). We’ve included a chart to compare time differences, why don’t you test your mathematical skills?

No electricity! Our lives......

Kids, think back to power outages during typhoons, aren’t they inconvenient? Those were only outages for a few hours, imagine if power outages lasted a week, can you imagine life like that? One day, the Earth’s resources will be depleted. When we no longer have coal or oil for thermal power, no uranium for nuclear power, and are restricted by geography and cannot build more hydroelectric power plants, we are left with one external source of energy – solar power. The advantage of using solar power is that it’s unlimited and does not cause pollution like nuclear or thermal power or affect the environment and habitats like hydroelectric power; it is the cleanest, most abundant energy source. With so many advantages, why isn’t it more common? The reason is it costs too much and can’t be used in mass. The shortcoming of being easily affected by weather hasn’t been solved either (due to the Earth’s atmosphere, the element of unstable weather is more severe compared to outer space) However, some small electronics in our lives such as calculators and handheld toys already use solar power to operate!

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We take the things we see from our eyes for granted, but did you know that in nature, some animals see the very differently from us!

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The visual differences are related to the vision of animals, so let’s begin the story hundreds of millions of years ago! Organisms back then didn’t have real “eyes” because their vision relied on the “photosensitive cells” on their skin. Through continuous evolution, what we call “eyes” gained the ability to identify shapes, detect moving objects, and differentiate color.

The compound eyes of insects: Many insects have many eyes, we call them “compound eyes”. They are mostly formed with small hexagonal eyes and the bigger the compound eye, the more number of small eyes there are making them more sensitive to reacting to moving objects However, compound eyes don’t necessarily allow insects to see further, as they often can only see objects 1-2 meters in front of them. Different insects have varying amounts of compound eyes. For example, butterflies have more than 10,000 small eyes, while dragonflies have more than 200,000 small eyes .

The strings of instruments like guitars or violins vibrate very quickly when they produce sound; however, our eyes can’t see the vibrations. How can we convert the vibrations of the strings into visible waves? “Cylindrical oscilloscopes” use stripes on a large cylinder to present the vibrations of guitar strings as visible waves, it’s very interesting.

The Apology Chair uses the natural reaction of our visual system. Our visual system mistakenly sees a complete object, and it is mostly complete, but in reality the seat and legs of the Apology Chair are separated by a lot of distance. If you stand at the right position, you’ll think the chair is normal because the seat and legs are connected instead of seeing a chair with a giant back with 4 normal sized legs. Your brain takes these clues and pieces them into another reality. Your brain is constantly using perspectives to adjust your sense of reality in daily life, so people sitting on the far away chair look smaller. 

Where did his body go?

If you look in from the outside, you don’t see a box so where could his body be? If you look carefully, the area under the table is not hollow but there is a mirror attached to the protrusion on the box that camouflages it as a table. The mirror is also blocked by a wooden board to prevent having the legs shown through the reflection while the room is painted in the same color. Places that are reflected by the mirror have no decorations to prevent reflections giving away the fact that the bottom of the table is covered by a mirror.