New Device Shows Still Pictures with Moving Shadows

A team of researchers led by Martin Fuchs from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, in collaboration with Ramesh Raskar from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have managed to take photography one step further. They have done so by developing a novel device for a zero power display, which enables a displayed still photography to change as the background light varies over time.

The gadget is shaped as a sandwich of three layers: the rearmost one is comprised by an array of lenses which focuses the received light on the middle layer. This consists of a transparency film that has an image imprinted on it, which it projects on the front layer, called a “diffuser,” that displays the photograph. The image on the middle layer is, in fact, built of a few hundreds of images of the same object in different gradients of light.

 

The resulting picture is then divided into several thousands of tiny hexagons only a few millimeters across, each containing a number of points that reflect a certain lighting state. So, when the light is focused on a specific point of each of the hexagons, a corresponding resulting photograph is eventually displayed on the frontal “screen” layer.

 

More specifically, as the Sun moves from east to west throughout the day, its light will be focused on particular points of each of the thousands of hexagons of a composite image of an object photographed hundreds of times during different sunlight angles. As the points vary with the Sun's motion, the resulting image will create the impression that its shadows are moving.

 

Currently, the team is seeking to improve the technique by enhancing its three-dimensional effect, as well as for potential applications and customers. For now, the developers believe it could provide more depth to bill board displays.