A 3-D look down the RabbitHole

The advance that makes such compelling effects possible is the development of a three-color pulsed laser that is better than the previous two technologies – continuous wave and single-color pulsed lasers. The new pulsed lasers require only a one-ten-millionth-of-a-second spurt of red, green, and blue light, whereas previous systems employed a low-intensity lamp, which required exposure times lasting from just under one second to a few minutes. Unintended vibrations during these longer exposures lead to diminished resolution of the hologram.

RabbitHoles Media brought the technology to the United States in 2007 – and the company refers to each finished hologram as a “RabbitHole.”

Veta Bates, the company’s director of creative affairs, says RabbitHoles work much like flip-books because they reflect image sequences into the space in front of the print. But in this case, viewers walk past the images to make them change, rather than flipping pages with their thumbs. There are up to 1,280 different “pages” in each RabbitHole, she says.

RabbitHole software uses special algorithms to determine what you see. “Your eye and brain meld the images back together seamlessly and the image appears to move as you move around the poster,” says Ms. Bates.

In a two-dimensional world, a pixel is the smallest piece of information in an image. If you look closely enough, newspapers and computer screens are little more than grids of dots. In the 3-D world of RabbitHoles, a poster-size print contains about 275,000 holopixels, each with 1,280 angles or perspectives, meaning the viewer is actually seeing 353 million bits of visual information.

Data from virtual or digital cameras is sent to a printer, which divides each frame into holopixels. The finished product is transferred to Plexiglas, which can be framed and mounted. A halogen lamp is then shined onto the surface from above or below at a 45-degree angle, which produces the three dimensional effect. When examined closely without illumination, the finished print looks like thousands of ant-width boxes.

While the new technology seems promising, it faces obstacles to mainstream consumer usage, most notably the high costs and technical complexity of production. A single movie-poster-size piece takes four hours to print, and costs $2,000.

“We’re working on bringing down the prices and speeding up the production process,” says RabbitHoles CEO Todd Allan. Everyday usage, such as in animated holographic family snapshots, is certainly a goal, but at the moment, prices for single limited-edition prints in the upcoming show at the Gnomon Gallery run about $2,400.

The detailed modeling also has applications in science, architecture, and even museums, where it can be used to catalog collections.

While the technology is taking its bow in the heart of the entertainment industry (it appeared last summer at a comic book convention in San Diego, but Mr. Allan calls that “a dress rehearsal”), the artists themselves say the medium opens a new door for them as well.

“It is wonderful to have a display method for my 3-D artwork, which was created in virtual 3-D space and really should be shown in three dimensions for the full effect,” says Meats Meier, an artist featured at the Gnomon Gallery. “Printing my 3-D-created artwork onto a flat, boring canvas [has been] very depressing to me. I want to see it come alive and breathe its digital breath.”

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