The Anamorphic Mirror

1 — The source

the picture, as you wish to read it

2 — The table

painted distorted — warp(source)

3 — In the mirror

reflected back to the eye — unwarp(table)

A Renaissance conjuror's trick. A picture is pre-distorted into an unreadable smear on a flat table; stand a vertical cylindrical mirror at its centre and the reflection puts it right — readable and undistorted.

Azimuth is preserved by the round mirror; the picture's height smears radially by the exact specular reflection of the eye-ray off the cylinder.

The drawing

Mirror & eye

Feat: align the viewing to the marked ◆ canon — radius 0.50, eye 2.00 — for the perfectly-resolved mirror.

Mirror radius 0.40◆ 0.50

Eye height 1.30◆ 2.00

Picture span 200°

Look

Drag the mirror radius and eye height; watch all three panels update live. Panel 3 samples the warped table through the mirror map — if the math is exact, it reconstructs panel 1. The chip proves it: round-trip to machine precision.