Simply Swirl

Jan

by admin

Simply Swirl

Why do the camera images on the tv swirl around when It is connected to my camera and I face it towards the tv

when you connect a digital camera to the tv and point it at the tv, you will see the picture of the tv on the tv.
What facinates me is that it swirls and moves in and out when you get close enough. Sometimes there are many colours that radiate and pulsate. Am I viewing electro magnetic waves? Or is it simply waves of colour that are vibrating at different frequences and therefore being read by the camera at different speeds causing them to move at different speeds to each other? I have googled this but found nothing on this phenomenon. What is happening?

It’s probably a combination of two effects that our brains normally ignore.

1) Persistence of vision – the TV and camera both flicker many times per second. Our brains smooth this over so it all looks like solid images moving around, but when you hook up two things that aren’t exactly the same flicker rate, you get weird “beat frequency” effects (wiki “beat frequency” for more on that).

2) RGB color. Our eyes only really see red, green and blue, so we make our color screens to only display those. Normally, the pixels are so small our eyes can’t resolve any two, and it all blends together into a smooth continuous image. But, again, when you point one device at another you might get some weird overlap effects.