Pseudoscope

For my first exhibit design, I built a pseudoscope. I was not aware of this name at the time, but I thought it would be interesting to try to walk around with your eye positions swapped. The desired effect is to flip depth perception.

I was inspired by an exhibit at the exploratorium outside the room where we sat and drew. It took headphones and connected them to tubes that crossed over the wearer's head so that sounds from the left would come in the right side and vice versa.

In building the device, I centered the mirrors based on my own interocular distance, then set the angles of the mirrors to focus on an object roughly 6 ft away.

I was able to visually focus on an object pretty easily through this pseudoscope, but getting the desired depth perception flip was difficult at best. Most people who tried it out didn't know what was supposed to happen or exactly how to interact with the scope. Even with this knowledge, the quality of the mirrors and the set focal point made achieving the effect difficult.

There are a number of ways this piece could be improved:
I would like to make it more obvious how to use it. Affordances like a notch for your nose would be a good start, but it would also be nice to make the entire thing wearable, like a pair of glasses.
Improve the mirrors. Front surface mirror material, and mirrors of better surface quality would greatly improve the effect.

I would also like to try out some alternative geometries, like a hyper-stereo viewer, or glasses that use two periscopes in series to bring each eye back to it's original position except that the light has to go through a long tube to reach the eye, making everything look farther away than it really is.