Graphical Magic

I’ll admit it doesn’t look magical on your monitor.

I did a lot of work for my poster for the AIA conference last year. If I’d realised how long there were going to be on display then I’d have stuck up a page of A4 for people to read. It seemed rather a waste of effort, more so because I didn’t get the result with the poster that I wanted.

There are various problems with poster presentations, such as the trade-off between information density and readability. Too much text and the poster looks too dull for anyone to want to read. Too little text and you have to ask what the point of putting the poster up was. So I’d been experimenting with lenticular printing. I think I might finally be getting it to work. I suspect that it’s too late for me to want to use it for anything academic, but it might be an interesting technique for someone else to use. Lenticular printing is an old technology that’s making a comeback. Do you remember those photos covered in ribbed plastic? You hold it one way and it’s one photo, flip it another and you see a different photo. Except the photo was never that clear, being covered in thick ribbed plastic. Well, they’ve got quite a bit better recently. They are still, after several tedious months of tracking down printers, horrendously expensive. However, it’s now possible to produce lenticular prints with home PC equipment. The software I have is 3D Easy. It’s by a German company, but there’s an English version available. It’s all fairly simple. For a given definition of simple anyway.

The plan is that you have two photos of identical size. You load them both into the software and tell it what settings you want. You print it out on an inkjet printer, fix the lenses over the top and all is done. The settings effectively are whether you’re going for a 3D or a Flip effect and what LPI you want, and the last is the puzzler.

LPI stands for Lenses Per Inch. This is a count of the lenses on the plastic overlay and it’s important for what you want to do. A low LPI sheet will produce good effects from a fair distance away, but not look so good close to. A high LPI count would be great if it was something you held in your hand, but look like a blur from a distance, not good for a poster. That was the biggest problem for me. I was quite keen on having a photo meshed with a diagram. Stand on the left of the poster and you’d see one, stand on the right and you’d see the other, but you’re stuck with various problems. Ultimately I didn’t have access to a good enough printer. Now I do and the prints are, not brilliant, but suggest they might be usable with time.

I was unconvinced that they could be used for serious academic work. Holograms are much better, but recently at an i-Science meeting I saw some really good lenticular prints for topographic data. As for Holograms, I’d write up on those too, but I haven’t succeeded with them. Yet. —–