At Drexel, he designs amazing mirrors | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/12/2009
Above: notice the newspaper, a non-reversing mirror.
Armed with a computer, Hicks can customize his creations with exquisite precision. He achieves the desired effect first by characterizing the problem with sophisticated equations. He then programs a computer to spit out the coordinates for tens of thousands of points on the mirror’s surface - each one tilted differently to reflect light in just the right way.
The data are then sent to B-Con Engineering, a Canadian firm that uses a milling machine to make the mirrors out of aluminum. The metal is ground and polished with a diamond bit until the smooth, curvy surfaces emerge - a process that takes up to a day for Hicks’ unusual free-form designs, says company president Brian Creber.
