If you've seen the classic Alice in Wonderland, you probably remember the scene where Alice falls down the rabbit hole and is consequently introduced to a new way of seeing life. To this day, "rabbit holes" are synonymous with adventure, discovery, and new dimensions. This notion is exactly the reason "RabbitHoles," the Canadian 3D Motion Hologram company, bears it's name.

The company's mission statement is to give the world a new way of seeing by bringing 3D and motion to life, in print. To accomplish this mission, they have developed an entirely new print medium: a 3D Motion Hologram printed into a 2-dimensional film surface, which displays full-color 3D and action visible without special eyewear.

A RabbitHole works much like a flip-book, with an embedded sequence of 1280 digital images acting in place of drawings on pages...using film instead of paper...and the viewers' thumbs being replaced by the viewers themselves. The digital images each provide a unique perspective of the scene or object that varies gradually from one image to the next.

The technical side of the "how it works" all comes down to lasers:

Red, green, and blue pulsed-lasers are used to embed a diffraction grating within a small thickness of holographic film. Each digital image in the sequence is divided into a given number of holo-pixels using proprietary algorithms. The holo-pixels are then assigned to their necessary location amongst a given number of rows and columns. This grid of unique holo-pixels is submitted to the Company's patented printers, which utilize red, green, and blue pulse-lasers to embed the data into the specially formulated emulsion film. The resulting prints must be front-lit from either the top or the bottom at a 45-degree angle by a direct white-light source such as a Halogen fixture or sunlight. With the white-light shining properly on a RabbitHole, the diffraction gratings bounce the light in an extremely specific wavelength, and therefore color, which allows RabbitHoles to reflect full-color images.

According to RabbitHole's website, three characteristics make this new communication tool unique and particularly memorable:

3D/Z-plane: RabbitHoles are completely flat (0.7mm thick), yet the 3D imagery appears further in front of, and deeper beyond the surface than people imagine is possible.

Motion: Using CGI (computer generated imagery) or live-action digital video, RabbitHoles can hold motion sequences up to ten seconds long to tell a short story, or bring a character to life.

Interactivity: Viewers' movement in front of a RabbitHole triggers the immersive and animated content, provided by the image sequence embedded in the surface.

Like most promising new technologies, obstacles like high costs and technical complexity of production stand in the way of mainstream consumer usage of RabbitHoles. Currently, a single movie-poster-size piece takes four hours to print and costs about $2,000, but don't be too quick to discount the tech as a possibility just yet. RabbitHoles is working on bringing down the prices and speeding up the production and the medium has the potential to add a whole new dimension to visual communication...literally.

Check them out for yourself on their website. Be sure to watch the video on the homepage, it gives the most "realistic" view.

Adobe's Bruce Chizen confirms - Adobe's planning to move to web-based applications over the next decade. Maybe this'll make the InDesign server more robust?

My fondest wish is that, in moving their core applications server-side, they make them more interoperable too.
They're already shown some awesome online editing capabilities - Photoshop Express and Premiere Express for example.
Adobe's advantage in this space is that they already have a complete suite of powerful tools, and they've started the work of integration in a very savvy way.

Production 2.0, anyone?

Link

Link to press release

GAIN, the Graphic Arts Information Network, a unit of PIA/GATF, has established a training facility in the virtual world Second Life.

Quote:

Within [Second Life], printers are able to hold meetings, train employees, interview job applicants, promote themselves to hundreds of thousands of potential customers, and even sell virtual products and services for real money in the Second Life marketplace, which generates over $1 Million per month. The possibilities are endless.

I'm not sure how realistic it is for a printer to try and sell stuff from a virtual world - but the training scheme sounds promising.

Read more about Second Life Grid, the platform that empowers the whole Second Life world system, here: