What does it take to make a 3-D photobooth, one capable of spitting out the amazing Instagrammatical animated GIF seen above (without the animation, thanks to the Cult of Mac’s JPG-only policy)? If you’re design company Digital Kitchen, it takes three Canon 5D MKIIs, four MacBook Pros, a Sony HD projector and a whole lot of glue and paint. It’s called the Protobooth
Three images are captured simultaneously, from slightly different angles, like a kind of kitschy bullet-time. The images are then combined to make a three-panel GIF which rotates through the images and gives a sense of 3-D. This can then be projected onto the wall (parties) or shared on the internet (nerd parties).
The result is like a Harry Potter moving photo, if it was made in the 1990s.
I’m not entirely sure what four MacBook Pros were needed. Presumably it is so the pictures can be captured via tether and then combined instantly onto the fourth MacBook for projection purposes (using Flash, no less). To do this at home you’d still need three cameras, but you could post process on a single Mac (or even an iPad. Are there any GIF-makers for the iPad?)
Sadly, Digital Kitchen doesn’t plan on selling this setup, but if you have all the kit on hand, you can probably work out how to do it yourself. To see the effect of the full armed and operational Protobooth, head over to the dedicated site.
[Via DIY Photography]
