Lenticular Clock | Hacker News Reader

Lenticular Clock

instructables.com

192 pointsanimal_spirits46 comments

I love lenticulars. I'm working on writing my own lenticular software right now. You can see some of my lenticular math art here: https://gods.art/

Amazing work!

I did some experiments creating lenticular 3D and failed miserably. I'll look at what you got.

I would love to see the software, BTW.

Those are amazing! Are you hand aligning those lenses on the print or is there some sort of tooling/hardware/service that is capable of it?

Hand aligning is the only way I know of.

Any chance you could share the math behind the pixel snowflakes?

I’d love to know more about the floating exclamation mark in one of those pictures you’ve linked to

I just walked into the room and that was there. After some examination, I realized it is a projection of the forest behind our house shining through a crack in the window.

I love the Give and Take one.

When I click on a piece of art on your website it takes me to a page with an unhappy face and a message that says "No video with supported format and MIME type found".

Using Firefox 129.0.1

It's a MOV tagged as video/mp4. For me, FF recognizes only the audio part but if extracting the raw video URL I can play it with vlc.

They're the same thing. The problem is not the container, it's the H.265 encoded video which Firefox doesn't accept. It's not a good idea to throw raw cell phone video onto a website, first because it probably won't play everywhere, and second because there's embedded high-precision location data.

It's funny seeing this after the arguments in the mpv thread a few days ago[1] where over if VLC's extra bloat (and lack of features like stepping back a frame) is justified by it coping with diverse formats. This file doesn't play correctly for me in mpv[2], but does fine in VLC.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277014 [2] https://imgur.com/TeL4sfq

Thanks for the bug report.

Hexagonal Jewel Tunnel looks like a hyperdrive into space

I like how you chose the content of drawing so that it's complemented by lenticular effect instead of fighting against it. In many typical lenticular pictures that attempt to show an animation or 3d effect, there are angles in which you partially see two images thus ruining the picture by making it look blurry/striped. Not sure if it looks equally good in real life, but at least in the videos of your art the color gradients seemed to produce much smoother transition, which doesn't break the picture even when you partially see two consecutive frames.

Yes, if you want to do good lenticular art, you want nice smooth transitions (on a pixel-by-pixel level).

These are amazing - I'd love to buy one, if you are selling your art. Though shipping to the UK and import tax would probably make this prohibitively expensive.

I am selling. I can be contacted at caleb@gods.art. I'm really not sure how much shipping/tax would be to UK (never sold internationally).

those look great, you should post a Show HN about them. I'd be interested to know more about your process if you're comfortable sharing.

I'm most blown away just by the very existence of lenticular sheets -- I didn't know that this was a general-purpose thing that you could do at home Years ago I paid for a 3d lenticular photo print but I always assumed the technology to do so was out of my reach.

I took a photography course in the 90s and we did some 3D images that you looked at two photos through a viewer or by going cross eyed. The teacher tried to get us to invest in some lenticular pictures but the cost for a 16 year old was just too much. As I understood it back then, they cut your 2 images into very thing strips and then interleaved half of them. I'd not thought of it much since but of course it makes sense that a good photo printer and the right software could make this all far simpler.

Utterly impractical as a clock. Brilliant hack.

I guess version two will add a camera, an eye detector and two servos to orient the clock to create a real-live hybrid of xclock and xeyes.

given that the display is viewpoint dependent, you need to orient this clock to make it usable from a variety of vertical viewing angles

Also, one of many digital sundials:

http://www.mojoptix.com/2015/10/25/mojoptix-001-digital-sund...

I had some success making lenticular sheets using a 3d printer by printing a single-walled cylinder using a clear PETG, cutting it up and flattening it out using a heat gun. You can use the layer height to control "LPI". One problem is that it's double-sided, which reduces the quality quite a bit.

Won't this show the wrong glyph if you're looking at it from the wrong angle?

I suspect short people and tall people will likely disagree about what time is shown.

This must be what people mean when they say they are short on time.

Honestly, that might be my favorite part

You notice you're running late, so jump up, and now you're early.

Well, time dilation and length contraction do occur at relativistic speeds :-)

Hm, could that be fixed by covering it with a "privacy screen" (used to cover computer screens, basically a bunch of tiny parallel tubes (all-angle) or grooves (one-axis, probably best for this))? Then maybe a blur on top of that to increase the viewing angle again (though that might cut the light too much since it's not an active emitter)?

Maybe a pinhole and lens? Like a camera but having only the clock inside a chamber

>Won't this show the wrong glyph if you're looking at it from the wrong angle?

Time is relative (to your height).

I'm actually really disappointed this wasn't addressed with a fairly obvious "checksum" mechanism - Including the ":" in the center, and giving that it's own lenticular pattern, such that only when viewed from the right angle do you see the : and otherwise you just see numbers.

(I'm not sure if this is really plausible - Are the numbers close enough that that would actually work? If you're off to the right or left, or too high or too low, could you potentially see the : with a different set of numbers than intended?)

Seems completely plausible to me, and elegant to boot. To minimize design change, the product name could be the alignment check.

{You being too high/low} and {the angle of the numbers/check being wrong} are two ways of saying the exact same thing when ignoring the world beyond you and it, like using a handheld mirror.

Very clever idea. I wonder if instead of a printed sheet if you could combine it with an e-paper display with an interlaced image and then you could load different image sequences...

Clever in the "nice job, but this is not a problem I have, nor a solution I would want to have to listen to..."

- you could use an e-paper display without the stepper motors - you could use an o-led display and be able to read it in the dark - etc

Sorry I wasn't clear, I had meant clever in the same way you had outlined.

To explain my epaper comment, I've seen several small keyrings and phonecase-type epaper screens start appearing. You could combine a small lenticular screen with one of these to have an updatable animated image. A pure novelty for kids/big kids - a complete waste of resources for nonsense though...

Lenticular postcards were relatively popular in the 60s and 70s (iirc). A family member brought some from Japan and I was fascinated by them. Sadly, they got lost over the years :-(

A friend had a special lenticular camera, but that was ca. 1990 and he had to send the film away to get lenticular cards back, so even if you can find a camera, you may have to reverse engineer the printing/mounting process.

This is really cool! I had no idea you could just buy these sheets, I always thought you have to make them specially. The fact that you can buy them and then print a pattern is amazing.

The old Google badges used to have lenticular images, too. (Perhaps they still do? I haven't been working there in a while.)

They were swapped out earlier this year for boring flat-image badges. Major bummer.

Hah, that will make tail-gating behind a Googler by just flashing my old badge so much harder.

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