Morphovision – Distorted House


'Toshio Iwai Toshio Iwai / ' NHK Science & Technical Research Laboratories NHK Science & Technical Research Laboratories

Morphovision creates optical illusions by illuminating objects rotating at high speed with special light. It can make solid objects appear to soften or even fall apart. Here we have a miniature house rotating at high speed, and a touch panel for selecting a light pattern to illuminate the house. The type of distortion produced depends on the pattern selected. One of these patterns gives the house a crooked appearance, as sometimes seen in animation. This, and other effects, are achieved by scanning the object with light in sync with the object’s rotation, and changing the form of the light in real time. Morphovision distorts actual objects, as opposed to synthesizing 3D objects as in computer graphics. It prompts us to reconsider the nature of images and what it means to “see” the world through one’s eyes.

Another Time, Another Space, a work that I created in 1993, uses video cameras, video monitors, and computers. The system temporarily stores video captured by the cameras in computer memory, and combines or records some of the video frames to create temporal and spatial illusions on the video monitors in real time. Visitors standing in front of this work experience a mysterious sensation in which one’s body seems to exist beyond time and space.

After this work, I wondered about the possibility of experiencing a distortion of real space not through pictures, but with solid objects. This idea came to me after remembering a work called 3-Dimensional Zoetrope that I created in 1988. A zoetrope is a 19th century invention that became the forerunner to movies and animation, and in this work I inserted solid dolls made of papier-mâché instead of a paper strip of pictures into the zoetrope's drum, and created the appearance of a figure running. Around this time, I noticed an odd phenomenon. On peering through a slit on the drum, dolls on the near side of the drum appeared fat, while those on the far side appeared thin! The space inside the drum appeared to be distorted, which I found fascinating. Several years later, after creating Another Time, Another Space, I remembered my 3-Dimensional Zoetrope, and started wondering whether I could distort space in a similar manner.

I performed various experiments. First, while rotating a drum with a spiral-shaped slit, I inserted a rod and shook it manually. The rod appeared to soften. I then decided to illuminate a rotating object by having light from a light source in a darkroom scan the object through a disk with a slit. I observed that the object appeared distorted, much like the distortion produced when a document is carelessly moved on a copy machine while the optical scanner is moving. The result of joint research with NHK Science & Technical Research Laboratories based on these phenomena is Morphovision. In the current system, slit-shaped computer-generated images from the projector are reflected off a rotating polygon mirror to scan the miniature house continuously. Here, synchronizing this scanning with the rotation of the house can distort the shape of the house in 3D, and changing the pattern of the slit-shaped projected light can change the shape of the house in various ways.

During the development of Morphovision I learned that Joseph Plateau, the inventor of the Phenakistiscope, the world’s first device for showing moving images, had earlier created a device called the Anorthoscope in 1829. This unique device enables a distorted picture to be seen in its original shape through rotating slits. However, while the Phenakistiscope later evolved into the zoetrope and other imaging devices, and can be connected to the invention of moving pictures and the birth of today’s moving images culture, the Anorthoscope evolved into nothing. But now, after an interruption of about 180 years, the Anorthoscope lives on in Morphovision. I believe that imaging equipment like Morphovision that uses real objects may one day evolve into new 3D-imaging equipment and new means of sculpturing.