[doctorwho]

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!

[shashashasha]

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!

[doctorwho]

I'll dig it out of its box and take a snapshot, or a little video :)

[shashashasha]

that would be amazing! we're [e-mail]

[iancarroll]

Post it on HN, I'd love to see it as well.

[doctorwho]

Here's a quick video of the buckyball.

The video is from today. The image was printed about 18 years ago :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlysJLjUZZQ

[spiffytech]

That is amazing! I love the potential for actually looking around an object in a 2D printout.

[vanderZwan]

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!

[mxfh]

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:

iwdrm, mr. div, head like an orange

file under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_limitation

[shashashasha]

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!

[shashashasha]

It's just the 20-year-cycle of nostalgia ;)

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/17/_the_golden_f...

[doctorwho]

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!