Kaleidoscope (2D) | mysimulator.uk

Mirrors

Mirror segments 8

Light Trail

Trail persistence (s) 2.0

Rotation speed 0.15

Move the pointer over the tube to place a light source.

Live Readout

Wedge angle

22.5°

Virtual images

Angle of incidence

—

Light points

How it works

A real kaleidoscope tube holds two (or more) front-surface mirrors meeting at the tube's centerline, spaced at a wedge angle of 180°/N. Any object placed between them is reflected back and forth by the law of reflection — angle of incidence equals angle of reflection — and each reflection is itself re-reflected by the opposite mirror, so the single object appears to repeat all the way around the tube.

With N mirror planes spaced 180°/N apart, the reflections tile the full 360° into 2N wedges: N direct rotational copies of the object plus N mirror-flipped copies, one pair per wedge. That is exactly what this simulator draws — move the pointer and it computes each virtual image's position from the object's distance and angle to the nearest mirror plane, the same geometry that makes a physical two-mirror kaleidoscope produce a perfectly symmetric ring of images from one bead.

The angle-of-incidence readout is the angle between the pointer and the nearest mirror line; a real mirror kaleidoscope's image count only closes into a clean ring when 360° divides evenly by the wedge angle, which is why toy kaleidoscopes are built with a fixed mirror angle rather than a continuously adjustable one.

Move (or drag on touch) inside the tube to draw