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So I was thinking that polarized sheets of plastic would make fantastic windows / Force Fields for sci-fi terrain.


The Idea being that from a certain angle the model behind and in front will lose LoS. Kind of like a simulated glare.


So has anyone tried it? Also anyone have a link to a relatively cheap supply? I was thinking of hacking up one of those notebook privacy shields that they market to frequent flyers.

Sounds cool, although I've never tried it or heard of it before.

One time I couldn't make some regular plasticard work, so I reversed the polarity and that worked, but I've never thought about your idea before.

I'm not sure what you mean, but what I can tell you is that polarized plastic doesn't block light based on angle, it blocks it based on (essentially) rotation.

In glasses, for example, the polaraization is oriented such that light reflecting off, say, water, which is horizontal in front of the viewer, will be filtered much more than light coming off non-horizontal surfaces.

Phryxis wrote:
In glasses, for example, the polaraization is oriented such that light reflecting off, say, water, which is horizontal in front of the viewer, will be filtered much more than light coming off non-horizontal surfaces.

Thus the water is a different angle to the rest of the light and so the OP is right...

Transparency of light does not depend on the angle of reflection vs the polarized plastic, the light itself is polarized depending on the source of the lightwaves. The waves from the sun are polarized in a different way than light from a lightbulb or a laser. The effect is also used in 3d film projection to seperate the two images apart instead of using red/blue glasses.

Ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization for more information

My heads hurt now.



Ghidorah

Transparency of light does not depend on the angle of reflection vs the polarized plastic, the light itself is polarized depending on the source of the lightwaves. The waves from the sun are polarized in a different way than light from a lightbulb or a laser. The effect is also used in 3d film projection to seperate the two images apart instead of using red/blue glasses.

I was not talking about the angle of reflection, I am talking about the angle of a model relative to the sheet of plastic, Simulating reflection.




This is the screen I am talking about: