Diffuser (Polarizer) Glasses

As curious as I am, I opened up the LCD screen of an old laptop that would have been thrown away otherwise.

What I found inside seemed to be the most interesting material ever! There were multiple sheets of plastic that looked to be metallic and shiny, but reflected and diffused light in strange ways. 

Trying to come up with a fun project, I settled on diffuser glasses. 
--I honestly do not know what to call these things, polarizers or diffusers. Whatever they may be, please let me know, so I can put up the correct information!

I'll take you step by step to make these fun, yet disorienting glasses.

Note: I will not be responsible for broken monitors or concussions! :)

What it looks like:


 Thank you to my friend for the idea!

There is a fairly short list of materials

1. An old laptop or some spare sheets of this diffuser stuff. Old cellphones or anything with an LCD should work.
2. RealD 3D Glasses! (I got mine from Avatar, but really any fairly large glasses without lenses are fine)
3. Flat and phillips head screwdrivers
4. Small pocketknife, or anything with a thin blade that gives you good leverage
5. Scissors
6. White paper
7. Pencil
8. Scotch tape

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of me taking apart the screen :(

I'm sure there are other places you can attain this material, if there are, leave a comment!
But, it shouldn't be very hard!

I was a little desctuctive while taking mine apart, prying the screen off, because there was nothing else of use on the broken machine.

If you're having trouble you'll find a good instructable to take apart a laptop here: www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Take-Apart-a-Laptop/

1. Just get out a flathead screwdriver, and pry the plastic casing off. Do not worry, there is another metal casing inside.
2. When you take the plastic casing off, you should have something that looks like picture 1.  
3. Unscrew this casing apart, separate the parts and sheets, and you'll be left with an array of components, from the backlight, to the sheets we're looking for.
4. There should be two, very hard to describe sheets, that look metallic and shiny, yet are transparent at the same time, just depending on the angle they are looked at. Put these off to the side. 
(You can use the LCD panel itself as a cool room ornament, I hung mine in my room!)
5. Proceed to step 3

 Very simple step.

If you just have regular lenseless glasses, go on to step 4

If you have a pair of RealD 3D glasses, you'll notice that they have two layers.
Simply put, you can harmlessly take them apart, remove the 3D polarizers, replace them with our lenses, and put them back together. 

1. Get a pocketknife, or anything with a thin blade, and get it in between the two pieces of your glasses. 
2. Pry them off carefully, being careful not to break the plastic
3. Separate the pieces
4. Remove the 3D polarizers

 Now, we can cut out our lenses for our glasses.

1. Take the 3D polarizers from the RealD glasses and trace each one individually onto a sheet of white paper.
2. Cut out the paper traces of the lenses
3. Take out your diffuser sheet
4. Tape the white paper onto the diffuser sheet using two pieces of Scotch tape
5. Cut out the lenses using the white paper as a guide. 
6. Test to see if our diffuser lenses fit into the 3D glasses, if not, trim them down until they do

Now to finish up


1. Take out newly cut out diffuser lenses, and place them where the old 3D polarizers went in the glasses.
Note: It doesn't matter which side of the lens you put facing in a certain direction. They have different looks from the outside and inside when worn facing different directions, forward or backwards. 
2. Put the two pieces together
3. Wear them! 

And it's hard to post a picture of what you see when looking through them, because a camera can't quite capture that, so I'll let you figure out!