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Bringing the Waterfront Closer Via Periscope

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Residents of New Rochelle, NY have the benefit of a beautiful waterfront that is enjoyed by residents all summer long. There's just one problem. For most of the residents, they are too far from the water to actually enjoy that view on a daily basis.

This problem was brought to a team of optical and mechanical engineering students at the University of Rochester to see if they could come up with a solution. After some research, they discovered a periscope of sorts that had been built for a similar purpose in Brazil, only this periscope was mounted on a rooftop.

That design, built out of a shipping container, allowed residents of the building to see over trees that otherwise obstructed their view of a far-off waterfront, making for more picturesque scenery.

Using that as a model, the team of students set out to see if they could design something similar for the New Rochelle location.

Optics majors Jessica Bernstein, Yvonne Bodell and Katherine Smith worked on a design for mirrors and lenses to direct light to the viewer, while mechanical engineering students Hiroyuki Asaga, Carolyn John, Michael Kaplan and Catherine Yip came up with the mechanism that would house those viewing elements.

The final design called for a 70-foot-tall periscope with two mirrors and eight lenses, that could also turn up to 90 degrees, to offer a more panoramic view of the landscape.

While that design was too large to build in-house, the students did build a scaled-down prototype to prove the concept. The hope is that someone will find the results worthwhile enough to invest the resources necessary to build the full-scale design and install it for residents and visitor to use.
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Academic
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