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.

Our close proximity to NYC definitely has its benefits such as having easy access to pop-up galleries and events such as this past weekend's Gizmodo Gallery. If you're not familiar with Gizmodo, it's pretty much THE blog to go to for entertaining and informative insights on tech and gadgets.

The guys over at Giz decided to display the best of Gizmodo for the general techy public. They gathered up "the biggest and best from this year, strange tech from the far reaches of the world and prototypes from the dawn of the electronic age" and set up shop at the Reed Annex in the Lower East Side. They then looped the gallery idea in with a Toys for Tots fundraiser and let the fun begin!

Head to their site for a full list of items displayed and check out N-GEN's highlights below:

The biggest attention grabber was most definitely the 103-in plasma screen, but then again, it was hard to miss. The giant plasma displayed Mars in 3D, an ultra-high def virtual reality panorama from photographer Joergen Geerds, and video games galore. Other notables included the Back to the Future-modded DeLorean, which one homeless passerby touted as "the original bat mobile" that "could smoke any *expletive* cop car in this city, yo!," a live "Will it Blend?" demo of a charged iPhone (which resulted in a minor explosion), and the amazingly clear-pictured, yet equally expensive 11-in OLED TV from Sony.

Guy Kawasaki has a Q&A with Presentation Zen's Garr Reynolds here.
Definintely a good intro to the PZ approach, if a little light for regular followers of the PZ site.

Here's a sample:

Question: How did we get to this place where most presentations suck?

Answer: There are many reasons. First of all, presenting exceptionally well isn’t easy. In fact it’s hard. That’s why we find great presenters—and great communicators in general—so remarkable. They are all too rare. Many professionals simply have never had much practice and just follow conventional wisdom and do it “like everyone else” instead of doing it effectively.

PowerPoint and Keynote are both pretty simple tools, but there has been too much focus on the tools themselves. If people want to learn how to make better slides they should study good books on graphic design and visual communication to improve their visual literacy.

When it comes to designing appropriate visuals, there is a hole in our education. Concerning quantitative displays, for example, very few people have had proper training in how to design graphs and charts, etc. The great master Edward Tufte has written many useful books in this regard.
Link

The new Presentation Zen book

The ever-interesting site Presentation Zen has some presentation tips culled from Steve's latest;
Briefly:

1. Develop rapport with the audience.
2. Give them an idea of where you're going.
3. Show your enthusiasm.
4. It's not about numbers, it's about what the numbers mean.
5. Make it visual.
6. Save the best for last.

Worth heading over to read the full article, for sure.
Link

Looking to other continents has always been an effective way to predict what may be on the horizon within the U.S. retail sector. This becomes even more true when dealing with aesthetics and design. The export of the McDonald's brand to European markets has been a long and tedious exercise for the burger giant. Not satisfied with just catering offerings to the significantly different palate of our friends across the pond, McDonald's has been making a concerted effort to not only alter their menu but now their environments. A Parisian design studio was tasked with creating 9 different looks that walk the tight rope of retaining brand identity while overhauling aging environments. Could this signal a new trend in U.S. retail exporting their brands for "freshening" overseas?

McCafe in Germany

McDonald's in Germany

McDonald's Milan, Italy

New Adobe CEO talks to USAToday

Narayen takes over from Bruce Chizen.

From the article:

Adobe, best known for Photoshop photo software and Acrobat and PDF digital document tools, is shifting many of its wares from boxed software to online services.

USAToday interview (quite brief)

Amid many arcane notes about the ins and outs of the committee work involved, there's this basic bit of good news:

Adobe's PDF has become an accepted ISO standard.

Why do you care? Here's a quote::

Standardization through ISO of market-dominating technologies is good for everyone. The technology is already entrenched, so it does not entrench things further, but it provides a better basis for substitution (good for user choice and competitors) and interoperability (good for user choice and the dominator company and peripheral developers): everyone wins. They need to do this voluntarily before regulators use closed standards as evidence in anti-trust procedings.

In other words, since PDF is basically a standard anyway, the ISO certification means that other vendors can make tools with less risk of Adobe pulling the rug out from under them. This in turn leads to more competition and better products, including stable extensions of the standard.
Oreilly piece

I guess if you don't have baking skills, you're not their target audience...?


Quote:

Croatian creative agency Bruketa & Zinić have designed an annual report for food company Podravka that has to be baked in an oven before it can be read.

Called Well Done, the report features blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink that, after being wrapped in foil and cooked for 25 minutes, reveal text and images.

Now if we could just a scratch & sniff panel in there... Link

Thanks to Three Minds for pointing out this very nicely done Adobe Flash ad.
It pops up a whole little web experience, including the ability to buy the products - but doesn't seem at all annoying.
Nice touch - subtitles (even the embedded videos are closed-captioned). So I can read the message and not have to turn off Elmore James :-)
Ad in context here

Logo too small? Embarrassed at client meetings? Now there's a solution (er, a cream actually...)

Link