This, the official poster of the METATOYs research project, shows off a number of aspects of our work, including

• the view through a window (centre) that flips one of the transverse components of the light-ray direction -- an example of a METATOY, and a very unusual window that makes a straight cylinder appear bent into a hyperbola [1];
• a simulation of a photo taken with a special hypothetical lens (which could perhaps be realized in the form of a METATOY) that can focus on arbitrary surfaces (and not just planes, like normal lenses);
• the use light fields that are wave-optically forbidden in the sense that they cannot be represented perfectly by a light wave (METATOYs create approximations to such light fields that look just like the forbidden field) [2];
• TIM (The Interactive METATOY), the raytracing software we wrote to visualize the wave-optical properties of METATOYs (and to visualize wave-optically forbidden light fields);
• and finally, the pretty faces of a few of the people who were involved in this research (from left to right: Bhuvanesh Sundar, George Constable, Alasdair Hamilton, Johannes Courtial, and Dean Lambert).

(Incidentally, the silhouette of the train in the centre of the image is a simultaneous homage to the pre-Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, whose paintings often include a train on the horizon, and the Ninky Nonk.)

References

[1] Alasdair C. Hamilton and Johannes Courtial, Optical properties of a Dove-prism sheet, J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 10, 125302 (2008), doi: 10.1088/1464-4258/10/12/125302

[2] Alasdair C. Hamilton and Johannes Courtial, Metamaterials for light rays: ray optics without wave-optical analog in the ray-optics limit, New J. Phys. 11, 013042 (2009), doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/11/1/013042