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By way of explanation I remark that most of my 50 years
of working ( born London, England 1937, B.Sc.( Elec.Eng), M.B.E, same
employee number since 1956 except for a two year spell at Lockheed Aircraft
Georgia, in the mid 1960's) has been in the design and engineering of radar and
thermal infrared sensors. As I must eventually find something else to
do, I thought I'd collect some of the results of the work and play which I've
done most recently. (1) This is intended as an introduction to POVRAY for traditional optical designers who, if they have not already done so, would like to add a truly 'photorealistic' dimension to their raytracing designs.
The optical design and
evaluation tool, ZEMAX, presently licenseable from ZEMAX Development
Corporation, is one of the most powerful professional tools available for
creating and analysing almost any optical sytem. Typical applications
are for imaging optics for cameras, or light manipulation systems such as illuminators,
or fibre optic components in communication systems. Although
ZEMAX and POVRAY are both programs whose purpose is to show the way light
behaves as its energy interacts with natural and cultural objects, their
applications were originally very different. ZEMAX is primarily an
optical systems design tool for designing image forming optical systems such
as camera lenses. In its early days POVRAY was a hobby tool
for those with strong artistic imagination, but who are possibly more fluent
with mathematics and computers than they are with an artist's paintbrush.
But the introduction by Nathan Kopp http://www.nathan.kopp.com/ of the
mathematics of the 'photon mapping' technique developed by Henrik Wann
Jensen http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/
transformed POVRAY from a hobby application into a serious optical
analysis tool for professional use. I've
used for many years the (2) A number of designs of apochromatic lenses using modern glasses
This work arose from a desire to buy an eyeball telescope for a holiday visit to more favourable skies. It expanded to assesss the possibilities of high performance lenses designed for 35mm and 80mm SLR cameras. It was expanded in April 2007 to create lenses suitable for the very large CCD focal planes now available for astronomical electronic cameras
(4) Loudspeaker modelling This item is not
in the generic field of optical design and engineering. I placed it
here as a contribution to the largely US community of devotees of the
JBL loudspeaker brand and its legacy forum http://www.audioheritage.org
During the 1960s to 1980s JBL were the US market leaders in loudspeakers for
both the high fidelity domestic market and public entertainment.
By 2002 they had largely withdrawn from the domestic market in the
face of severe competition from Eastern and European manufacturers, and now
concentrate on the public entertainment market, which is substantially more
lucrative, and better matched to their industrial manufacturing capability. |
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Copyright © Don Barron 2007 |
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