| The iPhoto Flip Book - why not? | | Date Created: 22 Jan, 2005, 12:28 AM |
 I gave a presentation last night to the Rotary Club of Brighton, a Melbourne bayside suburb, whose members are very active in community activities. I choose to talk about Virtual reality approaches to anxiety treatment, something I have blogged about on this page some time back, here.
I was offered my own sources of anxiety - doing the walk, not just the talk - when I discovered their DLP projector had just arrived that morning, and had never been used. Making things even more interesting was that it was a Dell!
I joked with the crowd that it would be interesting to see if a Dell product and an Apple product (my Powerbook) could get on with each other for the 30 minutes of my talk, especially since history saw their originators still holding each other in contempt!
Moreover, one of the committee mentioned to me prior to starting my talk that he couldn't recall a multimedia presentation ever working properly at their club!
As it turned out the combo worked flawlessly, albeit for the occasional dropout of my bluetooth conenction, wherein I used my Sony Ericsson T-610 cellphone to control the Keynote slideshow using the Salling clicker software.
This is all by way of introduction to saying that I needed to show to a population of non-psychologists why Virtual Reality was relevant to anxiety treatment, and how it had value over more traditional interventions.
This meant giving a history of VR down the ages, and how humans have mastered processes of fooling the eye into believing in illusions of "presence", starting with the drawing of animals in caves in Spain and France dating back many thousands of years, moving to the introduction of dimensionality in painting in the fifteen century, and moving through to trompe l'oeil - shown below - all of which represent efforts to fool the eye/brain. |
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| In 1868, the first "flipbooks" were invented, the precursors to modern forms of cartoons or animations. You might remember in school days drawing small pictures in the corners of Post-it note pads or books, and "flipping" them such that you caused movement to occur. |
 Flipbooks were quite popular in the early 20th century, and are making something of a comeback in modern times. More school-age children are learning about moving-making techniques - using iMovie for instance - and being taught the history of film production, including how flipbooks, and earlier animations, fools the eye.
So I got to thinking how hard might it be to use iMovie to video a small scene - say a family wishing friends Seasons Greetings, exporting the frames into iPhoto, and sending them off to be developed as an iPhoto book (the small one) which comes with a minimum of 20 pages for $3.99 and up to 100 pages (for an extra 29c/page).
Because the pages are double-sided, in fact you would get two flipbooks for the price of one, since you could reverse the pages. |
 Now I think that would make a unique gift, and it certainly wouldn't take much for Apple or anyone else to help beginners work out the time gap between exported frames to make the flipbook animation work well.
At $3.99 for a 20-page book sized 2.6x3.5 inches, it's the perfect size for a flipbook, and would make an excellent personal gift, product demonstration, or marketing gift.
Children and teenagers would get a real buzz converting their own movies of their pets or friends playing. More adult uses I'll leave to your imagination! |
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