I find myself interested in making a custom lenticular sticker, and it’s been a while since we treated ourselves to a side quest so… Let’s see what we can do with our little robot.
What is a lenticular image
Lenticular images are the kind that morph or appear 3D when changing viewing angles.
This company produces 128 line per cm (?) lenses. These are used for up/down tilt and don’t look good for left or right.
75 line per cm (?) lenses are good for left/right tilt, from 3 - 12 layers of image changes.
Left to right is probably our best bet. Any thoughts? I see it as something you walk by, rather than rotate top to bottom.
Feasibility study
The current robot sticker is 8x5.4 cm, so 8.5x5.4 cm seems like a good fit. A single proof is 20kuai ($3-ish), and production for >100 is 1kuai each ($14-ish). At those prices we should get samples of 100 and share them around.
Seems great! There are some unknowns:
- Most of these are advertised as cards, can they also be adhesive backed? What is the quality of the adhesive (e.g. 3M)?
- They seem to have set shapes, but can they be custom cut? If not, can one of our other suppliers cut them for us?
Design guidelines
- Avoid white as it bleeds between the lenses. We may need to change the robot background color
How will it look?
First, what are the types of lenticular images?
Different types:
Thank you Wikipedia.
I want to stick with our existing image, perhaps with some slightly updated views if the artist is available. Let’s look at animated and stereoscopic.
Animated
Some initial ideas -
- Animate the hand moving slightly in front of the robot face
- Perhaps a wink of the eye. Maybe the winking eye becomes a terminal cursor?
- Maybe a green terminal cursor on the bus pirate blinking as it moves
I can cut the hand out in GNUimp so we can get a sample made quickly. The other changes will require the artist to do a few new elements.
Stereoscopic
Some initial ideas -
- Pull out the Bus Pirate and fingers into a front layer
- Float the Bus Pirate text on the front layer
- Put the sleeve on a second layer
- Rest of robot on 3rd layer
Most factories advertise the ability to 3D-ify your existing image, so this may need no additional work.
Next steps
Printing companies work weekends, and often have reps 24x7. We need to pick a few and ask the questions above. One will be more pleasant to work with than the rest and we’ll order some prints.
It will not say “5”
The original Bus Pirate sticker isn’t on this computer, so that is all I could find. The sticker will not be version specific. Unless you want it to be 
