Feb. 05, 2000:
i-Art i-MagicPrint - do it yourself - lenticular print
kit for true stand-alone 3D & animation on a piece of cardboard and
plastic
You know these rib tread plastic cards from cornflakes boxes and souvenir shops with 3D-images or little animations on it? Well, now you can do it yourself, with your own images on your own PC and color printer. Imagine a postcard with your girlfriend morphing from 'with clothes-on' to... uhm... ehm...some other dress.
The package by i-Art (famous for the Eye3D) comes with all the software and materials you need. Yes, there are lenticular lens-sheets in the box and you can buy more from i-Art. There are different sizes and horizontal as well as vertical lens-arrays.
The software has a futuristic non-standard user-interface. Needs some time to get into, but gives a nice 21st-Century-non-Bill-Gates-Feeling.
There are 3 basic design pattern: Stereoscopic, Flipping Image (one image turn into another) and Animation (4 frames).
The Stereoscopic-design goes like this: You take several seperate images, lets say sky, mountain, grass, cow, flower. Then you cut out the objects (like the cow) and define the depth-level of the object. I'm not shure yet how to process real stereo-pairs from a 3D-camera or 3D-software-package with i-MagicPrint.
The kit comes in an attractive, soft zipper-gift-bag with CD, manual, 6 lens-grids (postcard size), adhesive foils, fix-on tool, 2 already finished demo 3D-cards and a very neat picture-frame made of colored rubber foam, which looks like the hand-held PC of the future.
For a v1.0 piece of software the program runs very stable. I had no crash during testing.
The most delicate thing about producing your own 3D-cards should be to get the print-out right. I had some problems with my printer, but the problems should be solvable. I just didn't invest enough time into this.
I'd love to do a thorough review of i-Magic Print, but time is problem, so this may take a while.