Images can be REAL or VIRTUAL and there is one simple way to differentiate between them. This is an important statement that may be useful when answering questions on this subject:


REAL IMAGES can be captured or projected onto a SCREEN, whereas VIRTUAL IMAGES can’t !!


Let’s take a look at some examples to try to make sense of this. First of all we will look at a REAL IMAGE produced with a CONVEX lens:



An example (that we use every day) of this type of projection: