FAQs
Lenticular Photography
Lenticular photographs, and their animated counter parts, sometimes called Virtual Video, work by splicing images together either using a computer or photographic op- tics. Splicing in this case means taking a thin strip from the first image and pasting it beside a strip of the second image. The next strip of the first image is then pasted next to this and so on.
A lens array, usually a plastic sheet known as a lenticular screen, is placed over the spliced images. The lens array causes one eye to see all the strips from the first image with one eye and all the strips of the second image with the other eye. This creates a dimensional picture. If several images are combined in this fashion, each being the frames from a movie, a moving image can be created.
Because our eyes are positioned horizontally, the three dimensional lenticular photo- graphs have the screen running vertically, relative to the viewer. This allows the lenses to direct the correct images to the left and right eye. If a sequence with fast motion were used, there would be a great disparity between the left and right eye view. For animated lenticular images, the screen is placed horizontally and movement is seen by tilting the image up and down. This way, there is no stereo cross over and the pictures (although two-dimensional) appear to move.
The field of lenticular photography has developed rapidly over the past few years, enabling more pictures and finer screens to be used. The modern lenticular is very different from the simple "flip images" found in cereal packets of the 1970's.
