CMY Cubes : FirstLook
...for thinking about and playing with light!
An interesting object showed up at the RainyDayMagazine office this week: a glass cube that can subtract specific wavelengths of light depending on how the cube is angled.
In another life, some of us here did a bit of work in the neurobiology of vision, color science for printing, and related areas, so the cube was an immediate hit!
CMY Cubes
The CMY Cube is a glass object which lets one “play” with subtractive color mixing. By rotating the cube or changing the view angle, specific frequencies of white light are either reflected or filtered as it bounces off or passes through the glass, giving rise to different colors seen by the viewer.
This is NOT a cube made up of smaller cubes. Get that out of your head right now.
Many of us don’t really give much thought to how colors are actually perceived, but it is not as settled a question as you might think.
Most of us remember (possibly from that third grade science class) “the thing” (third-grade-speak) about light going through a prism, and we more or less know about RGB being associated with the cones in the human eye and computer displays, and CMY colors are somehow involved with printing.
But, there are other fascinating theories and exceptions regarding color perception in the world. Insects and animals can commonly “see” ultraviolet and infrared. Some, like the mantis shrimp with its 12 different receptors, can see colors our brains cannot even comprehend!
Another less-understood eyeball/brain pairing is that some humans (NOT mantis shrimp) can actually see 100 times more colors than normal folks. It is unclear whether this is because those peoples’ eyes have an additional color sensor or that there’s a difference in the sensors in each eye, which can give rise to the greater combination of perceived colors by the brain.
The awesome-sauce-iness of this thing—large or small version—cannot be overstated.
Color Science
Similar to “The Hokey Pokey” but with colors…
The theory of color perception is too enormous a topic to take on in this article, but there are some basics that we think would interest RainyDayMagazine readers. Below are the links to good intros for each concept:
Dichroic cube
Adding “things” to glass to give it different colors was discovered a long time ago. Eventually, someone noticed that specific materials gave the glass the ability to “change” the color of the light passing through it depending on the angle. The process of creating “dichroic glass” has been evolving ever since.
For a more detailed explanation of dichroic filters (aka the “specific materials), the Wikipedia page is very good (and give Wikipedia the two bucks when they ask! You know you use it all the time…)
Still not made out of multiple cubes of glass
THESE ARE NOT JELLO SHOTS. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EAT.
The CMY cube filters for the colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and each color filter is repeated on the opposing side of the cube.
Because the cube is transparent, light passing through it will be filtered by the same or different filters (depending on the angle at which you’re looking through it). There are also internal reflections that create combinations which we don’t fully understand at the moment.
Some people call this magic, we call it SCIENCE (which technically is the explanation of magic)
Regardless of whether we will actually figure out what is going on, the CMY glass cube is an awesome “desk toy” for thinking about and playing with light. It will, at least for us, certainly lead to a renewed appreciation of the “complexity of color .”
Link to items mentioned:
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