Rampo Edogawa was a Japanese writer who liked to write mystery novels. He admired Edgar Allan Poe so much that he changed his real name “Hirai Taro” for “Rampo Edogawa”. “Rampo Edogawa” is the Japanese pronunciation for “Edgar Allan Poe”. If you have never read any of his books I recommend you this book with some of his best short stories.
One of his obsessions and recurrent themes in his novels and short stories are mirrors and optical effects. He loved the “reality distortion” and deformation power that mirrors have. One of his stories is called “Kagami jigoku” (鏡地獄), it could be translated as “the infernal mirror” or “the mirror hell”. In this story, there is an empty sphere with a mirror inside. What would you see if you are inside that mirror ball? That’s what some Japanese asked themselves.
In the next video, there is a guy who enters a “mirror ball”. What you see in the screen is what it is being recorded by the camera he is wearing in his head. At the bottom-left corner you can see a diagram with the guy’s position each moment. It’s difficult to understand but still interesting. The most interesting moment can be seen at 5:50 where a “virtual 3D wall” divides the ball in two parts, it looks like some kind of plasma!
2 replies on “Inside a mirror and Rampo Edogawa”
This is a TV show produced by boy band, Arashi. There’s a more interesting experiment where one of them dresses up in this mirror robot suit, and tries to blend into environments, effectively becoming ‘invisible’. http://www.divshare.com/download/2329028-d96
cool, that was a technology developed also by Japanese