MakerSpace

Make a camera for lenticular photography Wiggle Time You can take lenticular images with a homemade camera to re-create the “wiggle” pictures of your childhood.

-  Günter Pomaska

Lenticular images store multiple exposures in the same area. Animation is achieved by tilting the image. Another application creates a spatial appearance without special tools (autostereoscopy). The digital version of this often shows up on social media as a “wigglegram.”

Lenticular Cameras

On the consumer market, lenticular cameras are sold under the name ActionSampler. More than 40 years ago, the four-lens Nishika (Nimslo) appeared, followed by Fuji’s eight-lens Rensha Cardia in 1991. Unlike the Nishika’s synchronous shutter action, the Fuji exposed the 35mm film sequentially. Even today, the analog scenes are still very popular on Instagram and the like.

One way of creating a multilens digital recording system is to use a Raspberry Pi and a Camarray HAT [1] (hardware attached on top) by ArduCam [2]. The camera I make in this article uses four Sony IMX519 sensors arranged at a distance of 4cm apart (Figure 1). After the first exposure, you can move the device by half the camera distance, which produces eight shots of a subject at equal distances with a total of 32 megapixels (MP).

Lenticular Technology

The predecessors of today’s lenticular screens are corrugated and lamellar screens that take two and three displayable images, respectively. Unlike the planar image strips of their predecessors, the lens screens commonly used today are transparent films of semi-cylindrical strips that show multiple images simultaneously [3]. Depending on the viewer’s angle of view, the left eye sees something different than the right eye, and the viewer perceives the view as threedimensional (Figure 2).