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Reflectance Paper: Photography from a Whole New Perspective

Thursday, August 16, 2012 0:20

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(Before It's News)

paper-375 copy

When you look at an ordinary photograph, the image remains the same regardless of how you illuminate it. Which is great – because maybe you don’t want any more realism in your High School Yearbook (seriously, what was I thinking with that shirt? And that haircut) Well check this out: Reflectance Paper. Instead of tiny dots of different colours, we have tiny dimples that reflect light in different ways. As you pass the light source over the paper, it reflects light back to the eye depending on the location of the ink of the dimpled pixel. Still confused? Let’s have SCIENCE explain it (actually, his name is James Davis, Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz)

If the paper is flat, it will always look flat no matter what you print on it. So the question became how to get the surface of the paper to have geometry to it. With the reflectance paper, for each pixel we have a little dimple that has all angular directions on its surface. Now we can print ink over it in a way that controls the angles of light that will be reflected from each pixel.

Okay, maybe that didn’t help. I think we need a video

Looking at the Old from every Perspective

You get it now? But what is it good for? Museums have expressed a great interest in this technology because Art Historians and Restorers can document valuable works of art via this method better than they would have before. Down the road, big storefront banners, souvenirs or artwork could be made with this technology to produce the grand illusion of 3D. Of course they’re not the first – holography has been around forever. But it’s another way 3D has found it’s home on 2D mediums.