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.

Here's a convenient little app from LinkedIn - it watches Twitter and catches tweets referencing keywords associated with your profile (companies, schools, etc.)

Company Buzz is an application that allows you to see what people are saying about companies and topics you care about. Company Buzz uses information from your profile such as companies and schools to find relevant discussions on twitter. Company buzz also shows you how frequently your company or topic has been mentioned and the top words associated with your company and the topic. You may add new topics and customize existing topics with new search terms to get just the results you are interested in.

(Marginally) more info here.

Over at Social CMS Buzz, there's an intriguing list of sites built on Drupal - some of which I wouldn't have guessed (Mission Metallica? Looks like custom Flash all the way to my eyes).
Social CMS Buzz article

Here's a link to Drupal founder Dries Buytaert's more extensive - and more informative - list.

AppVee has video reviews of two new apps for Google's Android phone platform - bar code scanners that use your phone's camera for image capture. (see YouTube links at bottom).
From MIT's Ad Lab article:

These applications seem to be among the few with one or two natural business models built into them from the start. Placing contextual recommendations next to price look-up results is one; powering branded wishlists and registries is another.

MIT Ad Lab article about the apps

Previous MIT Ad Lab article about Instant price Checking at retail

YouTube videos:

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2zMPbVFIYE

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZkxkvWq9zE

Guy Kawasaki has an interview with Nancy Duarte here.

Excerpt:

Question: Why do most presentations suck?

Answer: Most presentations suck because:

• The presenter has not given the audience any idea why they are there or what the content means to them; messages are disorganized and there’s no unifying story line.
• The presenter uses the slides as a document or teleprompter and reads their slides with his/her back to the audience. This makes the audience feel like the presenter is slow or not very smart.
• The presenter is not passionate or inspired and has not connected to the audience in a uniquely human way.

Did you notice that presentations suck solely because of the presenter? Great speakers like you can get by without much visual support. Emotive qualities are the greatest assets in a live performance.

Guy's Article

Duarte Design

MIT Advertising Lab has interesting commentary on Burger King's use of video games. Here's a quote:

Burger King ... made the decision to sell the games at $3.99, an extremely low price for disc-based (as opposed to downloadable) Xbox games but, as it turned out, a potentially much better price than “free.”
By choosing to charge even a small sum, Burger King seems to have sent a message to consumers that its games had real value, unlike other advergames they might have played and been disappointed by in the past. Burger King further supported the games with a strong marketing campaign that included advertisements shown during Saturday Night Live and during NFL games. All this sent a very clear message to consumers: “There is something of value waiting for you at Burger King.”

This is actually one of a series of articles abstracting the book Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business

MIT AdLab article Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

And Guy Kawasaki's post about it:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/09/winners-of-worl.html

Here's a post on Flash banner ads that hijack your clipboard, and won't let go until you've restarted your browser (or your OS, depending on who's talking...): http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1733

And here's the thread on Apple's support boards - seems the first user to publicize this was on a Mac:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7768848

The folks at Yahoo - who own Flickr - have asked a few of their Flickr users for permission to turn their kitty photos into emoticons for the Yahoo Messenger.

Here's a link to some of the results: Yahoo Messenger blog

Here's a reaction from one of the photographers (I have reason to know she's thrilled):

Tunie is Famous!! "Talk to the Paw" Emoticat™ Icon released today!

This is an interesting twist on CGM - pull consumer-generated media from your user base (it helps if your user base is photographers :-) rather than waiting for it to be pushed to you, and meet the consumer half-way (in this case by providing illustration talent). Wonder if they did this with any other classes of photo, or is it just cat pix?
Apparently this is to support a chat environment called Emoticats - more here.

Here's where to get the Yahoo chat client.