Hiding Images in Plain Sight: The Physics of Magic Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28283411 - Aug 2021 (24 comments)
Hiding Images in Plain Sight: The Physics of Magic Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28220376 - Aug 2021 (1 comment)
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/magic-mirror-cincinnati-ar...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmKQsSDlaa4
I don't think there are any phase effects in the parent attached? Or are there?
This solution relies on a physicals height map (in the author's word, a 2.5D surface), whether that counts as a 2D surface I don't know.
(and yes, I also saw the great explanation from 3blue1brown).
This isn't 3D information on a 2D surface. If anything it is 2D information on a 3D surface.
You can probably build an end-to-end model of a grid of heights (constrained to be h=0 at the edges), a simulated ray exiting the slab (surface normals modified by whatever Snell's law tells you), and the eventual light intensity on the target plane... and immediately optimize the entire thing with backprop?
I'm probably massively oversimplifying this and ignoring half of the physics
It is just using refraction to make brighter and darker areas in its shadow/caustics to make an image. The paper is 10 years old at this point and linked by this article.
https://rgl.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/papers/Papas...
https://nishitalab.org/user/egaku/tog14/yue-continuous-caust...
I think once you read the papers you will realize that the only thing 3D is the surface of the lens and that is only so it can get curves and angles for the refraction.