The Eye

The evolution of color engineering began 40,000 years ago when primitive artists expressed themselves in colors made from natural pigments. They tested their colors on different surfaces and mixed them to concoct more colors. When you combine the fun of playing with a spinning top and combine it with interchangeable patterns. Build a Benham’s disk top and learn how black and white spinning designs are processed by the three kinds of cones in your eye. Play with blending lights and making many colors out of three key ones.

A complete light laboratory in a box. Construct a box that captures and focuses images. Use it as a camera obscura...an artist's drawing tool. Or make it into a model of the eye. Then rearrange the elements. Direct a light source on an image inside the box to project the image into a darkened room – recreate one of Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest leaps of invention: a projector.

Scientists and artists want to understand how the eye and brain work together. This device lets you spin patterns at controlled speeds. Blend images. Trick your eye into seeing colors where there are none. Make columns wobble in 3D after the artist Duchamp. Animate birds. Create your own illusions. Experiment with Benham’s Tops and patterns.

When the primary colors of light, red, green, and blue are mixed, white light is produced. By looking at the shadows cast when an object blocks one or more of these color components, you can observe both the additive and subtractive processes of color mixing. Instead of subtracting light via an absorbing pigment, the object's shadow "removes" the component color from the "white" light. For example, the yellow shadow is the result of blocking the blue led and only allowing red and green to mix. Similarly, yellow pigment absorbs blue light and reflects red and green.