3-D Technique Makes Posters Pop

10 U.S. theaters rolled out full-color 3-D posters with motion and photorealistic detail to promote the movie How She Move.Made by Quebecois company RabbitHoles, the advertisements feature oneof the film's characters tearing up the dance floor in an eight-secondclip that can be "played" in 3-D by walking from left to right of theposter. Despite the images' slightly transparent quality, what you seeis pretty close to the real thing.

"The sensation you first get when you look at this is your mouthautomatically responding with, 'Oh my God,'" says Michael Page,visiting professor at the University of Toronto's Institute for OpticalSciences and a RabbitHoles board member.

To produce the imagery, RabbitHoles creates a 3-D computer model ofthe object that will be turned into a hologram. A virtual camera takessnapshots at different angles, and a software algorithm developed byRabbitHoles calculates how light would bounce off each angle in thescene. The result is up to 1,280 different snapshots, or frames, thatnot only hold color, distance and angle info, but light patterns aswell.

To record the actual hologram onto a sheet of film, the data is sentto a printer that divides each frame into pixels -- a poster-size printcan hold up to 700,000. The company then exposes each pixel with red,green and blue pulsed lasers.

Source: wired.comAdded: 7 February 2008