Very cool! I wrote code to do this back in 1995 for a company called 3DCOM. We supported full color, full page prints from a sequence of 24 images, each from a slightly different angle to produce a 3D "holographic" printout. the effect was so good you could stick your finger into the image.
At the time (the dark ages of commodity printer technology) it required an EPSON inkjet that could do at least 1200dpi. After printing you just slapped a sticky-backed lenticular lens (lined up with registration marks) on the printout and voila!
I kept one 8"x10" 3D printout of a buckyball that's still pretty impressive looking, even after nearly 20 years!
That's amazing! That's why we're honestly so excited about using lenticular type technologies with gifs — they both feel like dumb, old technologies that are actually kind of wonderfully straightforward, and have a lot of creative potential! If you have any photos of that buckyball print we'd love to see it!
Twenty years from that to this? That's a pretty long time without anyone doing anything with this technology then (this doesn't sound much more advanced than what you did back then, except for the addition of internet and gifs).
EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I think it's neat this service finally exists!
My personal theory is, that it was tumblr's original arbitrary limit of 512KB (now 1MB) that elevated GIF content's artistic quality to new levels.
Before there were all kinds of GIFs, but mainly unedited direct frame sequences out of movie files, yet there was no need to keep the files small. Yet if you wanted to see them in your dashboard stream in their full animated glory, the GIFs had to be kept under that limit at all costs.
Creative workarounds were found (minimizing frames/short loops/masking out static parts of the image) to create outstanding rebloggable content worth sharing.
If tumblr didn't have that limit, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing the current GIF-renaissance, maybe reaction-GIFs, but for sure not stuff like:
Thanks for this! This thought has been stewing in my head for a while too. Like, for example, cinemagraphs are a creative invention forced by the constraint of the GIF format (ie, tumblr and imgur's size limit means playing to GIF's strengths, like only animating regions of images).
We've also heard from working with Mr. Div and Patakk and the others that sometimes they do hacks to maximize their oomph. For Patakk, sometimes his geometries don't take up the full 500px so that he can pack more motion in a smaller area (and so for our art prints, he's filling out the frame more because that restriction isn't there). Exciting times!
3DCOM was going with a service model as well but the internets were pretty new to most people back then. They also got a write up in the Pipeline section of PCMagazine (new technologies section) back when suck things mattered. I think I saved a copy of that too. Time to go digging through the ancient technology box!
This is an awesome idea. I would love the option to upload a short video clip instead of a gif though, and have it take 10 evenly spaced frames from the video. My nieces (ages 8 & 10) would love to use this to make prints of themselves in action, but it would be easier for them to be able go straight from a video taken with a phone to a printed product.
Thanks! We currently do support Vine and Instagram video, and you can pick a short clip from there. Processing all videos in all formats is a little tricky right now and it's helpful to have the pre-constraint of those social networks. Taking video from a phone is a great idea though!
It's pretty easy to extract all the image data from ANY video source using FFMPEG. If the command line version doesn't fit into your workflow, there's always libavcodec (what FFMPEG is based on). Give me a shout if you're interested in supporting any and all video formats.
Totally! We just need to do more work on our end to make sure we don't end up accidentally accepting multi-gig video files. Vine and Instagram is a convenient way to start because it's much more constrained :)
I noticed that all the lenticulars demonstrated have horizontally aligned lenses for a final image that you rock head to heel. Why not offer a vertically aligned lenses for a final image to that you rock side to side? If I understand correctly, a user should be able to do this themselves if they flip the source image 90 degrees, but an option would be nice. There are some issues with your eyes seeing different frames with vertical lenses, but that could be used for cool stereo effects too.
Hi Aleyan! Yes, side to side works but it works much better when you're further away (unless you've calculated the eye spacing and distance in your imagery). We're planning on offering the option for artist prints to be printed horizontally or vertically, because some of them will be hung on walls.
Vertically-aligned is a good way to get 3D out of lenticular prints because each eye sees different images. Unfortunately, this means that things that are supposed to be 2D/animated instead of 3D/still would not look as nice as horizontally-aligned ones.
10 frames is a little scanty, but I think the idea is great. I'm afraid most of my favorite gifs won't fit, but using this type of display is forehead-slappingly obvious - now that they've done it, of course.
Hi, thanks! 10 frames is a little short right now we agree, and we're working with our manufacturer to get even more. The main constraint is the registration accuracy between the lens and the print, which gets super hard when printing more than a few frames.
Have you tested making "loops" with larger frame counts by example printing out a strip and taping the ends together and spinning it to create a movie effect? Does that make sense?
This wouldn't work smoothly because each image would be, for example, 2 inches wide. You may have several frames per image, but then your eyes would have to jump two inches to the next frame. The old style zoetrope would have a much cleaner effect.
That's actually one reason why we're limiting things to up/down rotation also — the spacing of your eyes makes it hard to display lots of frames accurately when you're rotating it left/right. And zoetropes, so cool! We really want to try some of these out too: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/10/the-first-animated-gif...
You could have four of these (maybe more?) with the top edges glued to a stick (side view: +). As you rotate the stick, you'd see 10 frames per sheet, then focus on the next one. I'm not sure if that would work.
That's great feedback! We've been so rushed to get it out the door for the holidays that we're lacking some basic information up front. We'll get that up shortly!
It's definitely pricy if you order one at a time, but if you want a run of business cards costs come down to a couple dollars each. Or you can just staple your existing business card to a $1 bill!
>It's definitely pricy if you order one at a time, but if you want a run of business cards costs come down to a couple dollars each.
I found those prices in the 'how it works' page and nearly closed the tab without a second thought. You might want to give some prices for larger runs, or at the very least say somewhere that volume discounts are available. Now that I know that I wouldn't have to pay thousands of dollars for business cards, I'm more interested.
We totally understand! We still have to finalize pricing with our manufacturer so that's why we've asked people on the homepage to email us with business card / wedding invitation inquiries. It gets almost an order of magnitude cheaper logistics/labor wise to do large runs, we just need to make sure we can do a good enough quality job!
We're currently doing rolling shipping starting next week, and it should only take us a few days from you placing your order to us shipping things out!
As a student of philosophy of language I love/hate this debate. I'll say this, I feel badly for people who think the creator gets to control the pronunciation. Hopefully the prescriptivists will learn language evolves irregardless of whether we want it to. Whenever you think you have firm rules, you will find they will change momentarily. Let me know if you spot what I snuck in there.
We were lucky enough to have Sha and Rachel come to ultravisual for lunch yesterday, first time I got to see some of the lenticulars in person and they look awesome. I think they're taking this in a really fun direction, can't wait to see what people make with the service :)
I want to see more shots of the actual prints though, I only saw one in the video, be good to get a better idea of the quality of the print and the motion.
Genius! Just one request. Crop a little off the left of the animation. I can't stop staring at the hair on that thumb. It's like watching tall grass sway in the wind.
I was just looking at one of my children's books earlier and came up with exactly this idea. Two hours later, sit down on HN and someone has already done it.
I had this idea too a few months ago. I had looked at lenticular sheets and other things but stopped thinking about it eventually, not sure why. (except for the fact that is what I usually do: I have an idea, think about it for a little bit, look at how it could be done and stop there :))
I think it was a combination of the price of the individual sheets (on Amazon at least) and the need for a high quality printer and assembly (the print and the lenticular sheet need to be perfectly aligned). I was imagining a cheap service to get memes into magnets for your fridge but the prices seemed not to match this vision. Working with artists like this site is doing is definitely a great idea. I had started trying to find a local printer but I don't think I found anybody fast enough for me not to move on to a different idea.
This looks fantastic. I make gifs out of pictures I take on burst mode and these would be beyond perfect for presenting them. (try it at a party, it's much more fun than static pictures, also for posed group shots)
I'm waiting for flexible color solar-powered wireless e-ink displays to give the full "Harry Potter" moving-picture effect, but they're a few years out!
This is super cool. I've looked a little at lenticular printing for 3D prints but sourcing the lenses was a little more effort than I needed. I'd pay well over material cost to have someone else handle assembling. If you add an option meant for that I'd be all over it.
Thanks! What do you mean about adding an option for 3D prints? Do you mean doing the layering on our end? We could get you viewing angles and such so that you could upload prelayered imagery through the website normally, would that work?
That's great feedback. The first image is an actual example of a gif card at work (hovering plays the animation), and the third link is an explanation of lenticular printing. We should make it more clear though!
This is very cool. Is there any particular reason why non-GIF version is limited to just 2 pictures? It would be awesome to be able to manually upload a number of images, especially with phones supporting burst mode.
We'd love to offer manual upload of a sequence of images, we just don't want people to get the idea that they can upload 10 unique images. With lenticular sheets at this high framecount there's always some ghosting, so it's really for motion (gifs+video) or flipping between a couple distinct images (flip)
Hi! Yes, we are planning on having a way to integrate with Gifpop. We're talking to a few gif app makers and hopefully will have something put together soon!
(for the interested, we're currently built on node and express, which has been really great for prototyping and building out new endpoints that require lots of processing. our previous website, http://meshu.io, was built on python/django)
You have no pricing whatsoever on your site. I had to upload a gif just to see the prices. This is probably not ideal. I'd suggest adding a pricing page :)
How good can this tech get? Could you print an ultra-high dpi image, put ultra-fine lenses over it, and turn it very slowly to get several minutes of video?
Thanks! Meshu was our first project together, and we built it on Python/Django. It's been really fun and kind of crazy to have two projects with holiday rushes at the same time :)
At the time (the dark ages of commodity printer technology) it required an EPSON inkjet that could do at least 1200dpi. After printing you just slapped a sticky-backed lenticular lens (lined up with registration marks) on the printout and voila!
I kept one 8"x10" 3D printout of a buckyball that's still pretty impressive looking, even after nearly 20 years!