MIT’s FabObscura Brings Animation to Life Without Wires, Turns Everyday Objects Into Moving Displays

FabObscura, a new tool from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), basically lets anyone turn ordinary objects into moving displays.

Scanimations, also known as barrier-grid animations, serve as the foundation for this work. These are photographs that appear to move as a striped overlay slides across them, displaying different slices of an image and giving the impression of motion. You’ve seen them in children’s books: a galloping horse or a blinking eye comes to life when you move a plastic grid. FabObscura takes this to the next level by allowing users to create animations with complex patterns.

Put simply, you upload a series of photos to the FabObscura software. The program merges these frames into a single interlaced image, before the barrier is inserted. A patterned sheet then acts as a gatekeeper, allowing only certain parts of the image to be visible. Slide or rotate the barrier to start the animation.

The software generates the interlaced image and the barrier grid. You can print the image on paper and the barrier on a transparent sheet with a standard inkjet printer. Once assembled, you can attach the setup to everyday objects.

Another cool feature is nested animations, where one surface can tell multiple stories depending on how you move the barrier. Slide it one way and a car appears; slide it the other and it’s a spinning motorcycle.
[Source]