A GeekDad reader commented on a post of mine today about Edweard Muybridge and the way toy animals walk with a reading suggestion. The book, Magic Moving Images, provides a translucent sheet of acetate with vertical black bars on it, which you place over an image and shift slightly to create the illusion of movement. (Please note: This topic offers me the extremely rare license to feel like a professional blogger while inserting an animated gif into my post.) Hey, that felt good! Better take this chance while I have it...

I think the buffalo is gaining on him!

The author, publisher, or whoever else is busily promoting Magic Moving Images makes a point of noting that it is the "first" book to do this, for a reason we'll get to in a minute. This book was published by Tarquin Publications, a UK-based mathematical publishing company that also sells, among other things, some very interesting looking "make-it-yourself" pop-up books.


You can also make your own, using a program like Photoshop. Here's a demonstration of some very cool illusions using the same acetate sheet method. These pictures really pop, and they were all created in Photoshop. Wish I could find a tutorial.


There are also a pair of books you're likely to have seen in bookstores this season - Gallop and Swing. These books, published by Workman, introduce a clever (and patented!) mechanism for effecting the illusions: When you turn a page (i.e. open the book wider) it shifts either the acetate sheet of vertical bars or the image behind it. I could tell you which, but then I'd have to begin running towards you to kill you, although not making any progress towards you, while you watched in fascination.


I think the moving-picture-book industry could get around this patent pretty easily. Pull tabs, wheels, and other traditional, "mechanical" paper means of creating movement in books could offer the same benefits, as well as greater user interaction, than the page-opening method. - Jeremiah