Mirror Ripples

In the beginning I knew I wanted to create a ripple effect with mirrors, and play around with how it's motion changes the way light reflects off of it. It was really fun thinking up ways to make the mirror bend nicely, and though threading them all together was fairly time consuming, I think it works pretty well. I'm not sure how sturdy it is though!
I used an online graphing calculator to simulate and find a nice polar equation to use for the wheels-- I went through several before I decided on this relatively simple one (from http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch01.html) -- it was one that I had experimented with before, for a project in simulating actual water ripples.

I imagine the exhibit being at a slightly larger scale, with a point light source and a white screen above it. People could turn the crank and see how the light shimmers and bounces around on the screen, and compare it to natural water reflections. It would be a nice and simple (albeit crude) approximation of why water ripples generate the patterns they do.
For potential additions to the exhibit: It would be cool to have a small water tank next to the mechanism, with light also shining onto it! Or what I was originally thinking of doing was to have various cranks of differently shaped wheels that people could use and compare.

I remade this prototype later, scaling it up a bit and making the ripples go a little bit smoother by lengthening the mirror mesh and adjusting the polar function of the wheels so that it did not vary as much. I would have liked to use the original polar function, but my mirrors weren't divided finely enough for the original intended effect. I also added a white screen above the mirror. The reflections were interesting and surprising, but they were still a bit more choppy than I'd have liked-- I think I would definitely need to make the mirror mesh even larger to achieve the original effect I was hoping for.