HVOYA

Scientific Project: Optic" can be considered an interactive documentary journey into the depths of philosophical reflections, which possess the same power as the thoughts of ancient sages who sought to unravel the mysteries of existence.

Philosophy is the beginning of everything – the science of contemplation and how through it, we can understand the workings of our world. It's no wonder that in Wikipedia, there's a little secret. If you choose any article and click on the first non-parenthesized link, in most cases, it leads to a page related to philosophy. Optics is the science of light – its propagation through the environment and its interactions with other objects. However, it was not always this way. The development of this science began with thinkers pondering how our eyes work, what the sun is, and why visibility is poorer at night than during the day. This is the focus of the first chapter of our game.

It's challenging to pinpoint the very first optical studies. Perhaps they were the early humans who used a mirrored surface on a lake to observe their prey while hunting from cover. Or maybe it was the first religious priests describing our world. However, one of the first documented reflections on theories of light came from ancient India. In the philosophical schools of Samkhya and Vaisheshika, approximately from the 6th to 5th century BCE, light was considered one of the five fundamental "subtle" elements from which gross elements arose.

In contrast, the Vaisheshika school proposed an atomic theory of the physical world on a non-atomic ground of ether, space, and time. The primary atoms were earth, water, fire, and air, which formed larger molecules. Movement was explained from the perspective of the motion of physical atoms. Beams of light were considered a flow of very fast atoms of fire.

Ancient Egypt also did not lag behind in the study of light and optics. The first sunglasses were invented there. Instead of glass, they used thin plates of emerald. A costly indulgence, but what wouldn't you do for your Pharaoh!