Really fun, what Christian Contini did: he took a Second Life avatar, and photographed this avatar under different angles. This photo source material ended up as a first life hologram. This can’t be that hard to do? Keep your horizontal camera position steady and rotate around your avatar? Best you can do, is to cut the avatar out from the background, and keep that static, to enhance the 3D effect. Yet, I’ve never come across a service that allowed printing holograms from self-supplied photographs.

Woot! I must admit, I’d love to give this a try myself. It looks like an awesome - and even a bit a ‘nostalgic’ - way to import images from a 3D virtual world into first life. I want business cards like this. And portraits of my favourite befriended avatars to stick in my wallet. And a ‘Second Life’ trading card game with holographic images and cards such as Queen Tateru, Governor Philip, Watermelon Torley, Warrior Dandellion and Jester Prok… . :d

For more on the technique used, see below this video.

‘If not sure, mail Tobie‘, this is going to be my new (virtual) life motto. ;) October pointed out to me that I used the terminology ‘hologram’ wrongly here, and she’s right. Yes, I must admit, it does not look much shiny and rainbow coloured.

So if it’s not a hologram, what printing technique is used here? Lenticular printing: Each image is sliced into strips, which are then interlaced with one or more other images. These are printed on the back of a piece of plastic, with a series of long, thin lenses moulded into the other side. The lenses are lined up with each image interlace, so that light reflected off each strip is refracted in a slightly different direction, but the light from all strips of a given image are sent in the same direction (parallel). The end result is that a single eye or camera looking at the print sees a single whole image, but an eye or camera with a different angle of view will see a different image.

An explanation with graphics that make it all much more obvious, you can find here. Same question stays, it will probably be very hard to find an affordable price for small quantities of small lenticular prints… ? Jeej! Mr. Contini hints that it is something you can ‘DIY’ with a semi-decent homegrown printer. ;) *goes to read his full explanation*

Tags: hologram, lenticular, mixed reality, photography, sl to rl

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