Monday, April 18, 2011

The Portmeirion Camera Obscura

One of those interesting things I stumbled across while wandering the grid: a replica of the Portmeirion Camera Obscura:



In the immortal words of Wikipedia:
The camera obscura (Latin; "camera" is a "vaulted chamber/room" + "obscura" means "dark"= "darkened chamber/room") is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation.
The real life building includes "a small structure which features a lens, a mirror and a projection table in a dark room, all which can be used to view objects toward which the lens is rotated, including the hillside village." Hence the name. The Second Life version includes a scripted house number that displays the total number of sims, mainland sims, mature-rated sims, adult-rated sims, and estates:



The builder, Miss Tyche Shepherd, notes that "This building is loosely based on the Portmeirion Camera Obscura, found in the Welsh village where the 1960s cult TV series The Prisoner was filmed." Miss Shepherd's version of the camera obscura is a device that projects any sim: one need only use channel 87 to speak the name of the sim. Below, Caledon Downs:



Here is a picture of the real thing, taken from Miss Shepherd's description of her project:

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