elementsnstuff
New Member
I want to build a set of animatronic eyes that can move around, as well as dilate and expand the irises in a controlled manner.
My current rough idea for this is to have an inner eye stalk that moves around via nitinol muscle wire to simulate eye movement, and a magnifying lens that can adjust the distance between itself and the image of the iris at the end of the stalk to zoom in or out (making it look like the iris and pupil are 'contracting' or 'expanding').
I whipped up a pretty good HD image of what I want the eyes to look like, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to make a 2D, flat image look like a 3D, convex surface such as a real human iris to an outside observer. Any ideas? I don't really know enough about lenses to understand how to go about this, and I don't really have anything to test my ideas with. Ideally, the end result would be more or less indistinguishable from a scaled-up human eye, where the iris 'appears' to be right at the surface and moves across the surface of the eyeball appropriately.
My current rough idea for this is to have an inner eye stalk that moves around via nitinol muscle wire to simulate eye movement, and a magnifying lens that can adjust the distance between itself and the image of the iris at the end of the stalk to zoom in or out (making it look like the iris and pupil are 'contracting' or 'expanding').
I whipped up a pretty good HD image of what I want the eyes to look like, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to make a 2D, flat image look like a 3D, convex surface such as a real human iris to an outside observer. Any ideas? I don't really know enough about lenses to understand how to go about this, and I don't really have anything to test my ideas with. Ideally, the end result would be more or less indistinguishable from a scaled-up human eye, where the iris 'appears' to be right at the surface and moves across the surface of the eyeball appropriately.