The cool thing about keeping tabs on the Raspberry Pi community is the pure range of projects you get to see. Some of them are practical tools that can help you in daily life, and some are just plain cool. If you're into the latter, here are some awesome Raspberry Pi projects you can make that create illusions.

This Raspberry Pi project creates a floating image using a 150-year-old technique, and I love it

A simple trick, with an amazing result

Here's the project that got me on the topic of Raspberry Pi projectss that can create illusions. This example looks super high-tech, but in actuality, it uses a technique called "Pepper's Ghost" to make it look like an image is floating, when in actual fact, it's just fancy mirror trickery.

Pepper's Ghost has been around for a while; it became a thing in the mid-1850s to create the illusion of someone standing on a stage when they're actually somewhere else. Theatres could use this effect to have people "magically" appear and disappear from the stage, and it's pretty simple in theory.

This Raspberry Pi project takes this idea and applies it to a far smaller stage. The little Pi at the bottom transmits a video feed to a mirror, which then reflects it to the viewer's eye. To hide the projection, the ingenious creator put a privacy mirror over it, allowing light to pass to the mirror while also hiding the screen from the viewer. The end result looks like the video or GIF is magically floating in midair by itself.

A frustrum enclosure that creates a really stunning result

Even the casing looks cool

In a similar vein to the Pepper's Ghost illusion, this one takes a different approach. Instead of projecting an image up into a mirror, this one projects downward into a frustum. The end result is a floating image where even the casing it's in has a cool, sleek design.

However, this project goes one step further than just being a cool visual setpiece. It's also a media player:

The display has audio visualizers which responds in real time to music being played from a SoundCloud playlist. The display has a gesture control interface board which can detect various hand motions without being touched. That means that swiping or turning your hand in the air will allow you to play the next song, pause, adjust the volume, switch the visualizer, and other cool functions.

If you want to see this cool project for yourself, and gain access to all the code, 3D printing schematics, and instructions needed to make your own at home, be sure to visit its Hackster.io page for all the juicy details.

A volumetric display gives the appearance of a hologram

Don't try to touch it

Next up, we have James Brown and their excellent volumetric designs. He has two of them: the Rotovex and Vortex. Both of them work in a similar way, and as you can see from the video above, they are pretty spectacular.

Here's how it works. James set up a panel of LEDs that can spin around very quickly. As the panel spins, the LEDs change color depending on what stage of the rotation it's in. When all of the stages are combined, it creates the illusion of a floating hologram, almost as if the dots are hovering in mid-air. Of course, the panel has to spin really fast for all of the LEDs to "meld" together into a static image, so you best not put your finger in it.

If you want to see more of it, check out its details on GitHub alongside the source code.

Raspberry Pis can create amazing illusions

If you're looking for a cool project for your Raspberry Pi, why not set it up to create an illusion? Not only can you make it look amazing, but as we've explored above, you can use them to play music, watch media, or even play Doom on a cool spinning panel.