Uses an ellipse as a convex lens to refract rays of light from a point source.
Simulating something that IRL seems so intuitive and mundane as the phenomenon of refraction in a lens was inordinately difficult. Reaching this point required multiple redos of the 'project' and three full days of wondering, scratching my head, sketching, scrapping, writing, deleting and rewriting - over and over. The main hurdles I faced are:
- Detecting accurately that a ray has hit the air-lens interface
- Figuring out whether the refracted ray should rise or drop
- The fact that vertically down is the direction of positive Y axis for computers. This probably constituted the biggest source of headache and confusion though I'm not sure if that was actually warranted.
- The fact that the Processing IDE is wanting in the most basic of features one expects of a typical IDE.
I'm NOT using Processing again for this kind of thing. Whew!
Anyway, I consider this one done:
Code
Simulating something that IRL seems so intuitive and mundane as the phenomenon of refraction in a lens was inordinately difficult. Reaching this point required multiple redos of the 'project' and three full days of wondering, scratching my head, sketching, scrapping, writing, deleting and rewriting - over and over. The main hurdles I faced are:
- Detecting accurately that a ray has hit the air-lens interface
- Figuring out whether the refracted ray should rise or drop
- The fact that vertically down is the direction of positive Y axis for computers. This probably constituted the biggest source of headache and confusion though I'm not sure if that was actually warranted.
- The fact that the Processing IDE is wanting in the most basic of features one expects of a typical IDE.
I'm NOT using Processing again for this kind of thing. Whew!
Anyway, I consider this one done:
