A physical one it’s just light bouncing back and forth, but a digital one (when sharing screen for example) the computer has to create the image
Does it have limited number of loops or something?
In: 3
They’re pretty similar. You can think of a mirror as a screen showing whatever is in front of it. So if you put two mirrors facing each other, the first one has a reflection of itself in front of it, so it shows itself on itself. Then it shows itself showing itself showing itself. Then it shows itself showing itself showing itself showing… and so on.
Similar for a share screen situation, the meeting window is showing your screen, so your screen is now showing the meeting window showing your screen, then your screen is showing the meeting window showing your screen showing the meeting window… and so on (again).
Now, the screen image is represented as a finite number of pixels, and shrinks each time through the loop because you’re fitting a copy of your whole screen into a window that’s smaller than your screen. At each round of shrinking, you’re reducing the number of pixels the copy of the screen takes up, so you’re resampling the pixels to fit that smaller size and losing some information in the process. Eventually you get to the point where the copy of the screen takes up a single pixel, and gets copied for further iterations as such. On the other hand, for a mirror, the image gets smaller and smaller as it progressively fades into the distance (where distance here is the space between the mirrors multiplied by the number of times the image has bounced back and forth), but theoretically with a perfect mirror you wouldn’t lose any information and could “zoom in” to counteract that, at least until you get to the scale where quantum nonsense messes everything up.
I once nearly crashed IBM’s network. We’d just gotten the ability to remote to other computers, so of course we had to fool around with it. I connected from my computer to a cow-orkers, then tried to use his to connect back to mine. It refused, so we connected to a third computer then back to mine.
Started getting the ‘hall of mirrors’ effect, but couldn’t move the mouse to disconnect, it just reloaded the screen constantly. Other people started complaining about the network running slow. Ended up having to yank the network cable (token ring, this was so long ago) to stop it.
It was showing an uncountable number of windows. There is a limit to processing power, and it will eventually start to run out and get slower and slower, and probably crash. Like getting too many things on the screen in a game and the framerate drops.
If you’re talking about recording video from the monitor playing that same video, then the number of nested images is the framerate multiplied by the amount of time it’s been displayed, at least until the first one becomes smaller than a pixel.
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