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  • Visitors interact with the Anti-Gravity Mirror exhibit.
  • Learn to "fly" on one of the Exploratorium's oldest exhibits. 

    © 1982 WGBH Boston; Else, Couturie & Korty, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • Visitors interact with the Anti-Gravity Mirror exhibit.
  • Anti-Gravity Mirror

Anti-Gravity Mirror

Take off and fly in a mirror that makes half your body look whole.

Here’s an exhibit where watching is at least half the fun. Positioned at one end of this large flat mirror, you can create any number of gravity-defying illusions that will amaze you and your friends: Levitate, fly, swim though the air, grow limbs (and dissolve them), crawl straight up the wall like a lizard—the sky’s the limit.


Where:   Bechtel Gallery 3: Seeing & Listening
Exhibit Developer:   Artist Robert Larue (Bob) Miller, 1979

What's going on?

Standing with the edge of this large mirror bisecting your body, you appear whole to a person who’s observing from the front. To the observer, the mirror image of the visible half of your body looks exactly like the real half that is obscured behind the mirror. 

You look whole because the human body is symmetrical. The observer’s brain is tricked into believing that an image of your right side is really your left side. So just straddle the mirror, raise one leg, and you’re flying.

You can try this out anywhere where there’s a good-sized mirror that you can straddle or stand alongside—at home, in a department store, or in a dance studio with a doorway cut into a mirrored wall.

"Reflections on Anti-Gravity Mirror" (pdf) by artist Bob Miller

Exploratorium Magazine, Anti-Gravity Mirror article

 

Going further

The illusion of flight you see at this exhibit was used to create a low-tech, precomputer graphics special effect in the original Star Wars movie. The anti-gravity Landspeeders that floated across the desert landscape of Tatooine actually had wheels, but these were hidden by a full-length mirror attached along the vehicles’ lower edge. A camera filming a rolling Landspeeder saw a view of reflected sand and shadow in the mirror instead of wheels—so the car appeared to float above the sand.

 
Phenomena: Image Formation, Reflection, Symmetry
Keywords: mirrors
Collections: Seeing the Light

More to explore

Anti-Gravity Mirror

Learn how to fly with this neat mirror trick.

Palace of Delights
Produced for NOVA in 1982, Jon Else's film looks behind the scenes at the Exploratorium.

Related exhibits

Giant Mirror
Giant Mirror

Pause to reflect in an oversized mirror with endless possibilities.

All Eyes on Me
All Eyes on Me

Make yourself the center of attention—and reflect.

Corner Reflector
Corner Reflector

This reflector has you cornered: It always sends light back in the direction from which it came.

Cylindrical Mirror
Cylindrical Mirror

This curved mirror distorts your reflection in surprising ways.


IMLS acknowledgment

This web project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [MA-30-16-0175-16].

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