I picked up a sheet of acrylic — sizable, and still in the protective masking paper, at a great price — at a thrift store a couple of weeks ago, and I've been wondering for a while what to make from it. And I decided tonight that the coolest thing would be a Pepper's Ghost rig for my old tube TV, of the sort that Joshua Ellingson does.
The basic effect is that a sheet of glass or acrylic or whatever is placed over a bright video source at a 45° angle, which makes it act as a beamsplitter: you can see through it to whatever is behind it, but you can also see the reflection of the video. So an object filmed on a black background will seem to float in midair.
(The technique descends from stage effects, where a brightly lit actor under the stage would apparently be projected, ghostlike, onto the stage among the ones on stage. It was invented by Henry Dircks, but John Henry Pepper was the showman who improved and marketed it, and his is the name that stuck.)
Anyway, while I was looking for some details on making the thing, I hit a different demo video Ellingson had made, showing how you can demo the effect with a cassette or CD case positioned over a phone screen.
And I tried that out with my phone and a simple goldfish video, and it worked great! But my phone is also my only good camera, so I can't prove it. So my demo will have to wait until I get some acrylic cut.
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