MAmirrorYA by Megan Mary McGrath
Honorable - Contrived Category
School: West Boca Raton Community High School
Teacher: Elizabeth Wenk
In physics after learning about optics and reflection, I came up with an idea for this competition. My dog Maya ended up being the perfect model. In order for this optical illusion to work, the foreground needs to be as similar as possible to the background, so that it would appear Maya was cut in half. This works due to the characteristics of plane mirrors. Plane mirrors have smooth surfaces, the object distance equals the image distance, and the image size equals the object size. Plane mirrors create reversed, upright, virtual images, which are formed by light rays that only appear to intersect. All of these factors are what allowed me to capture this picture that creates an optical illusion.
