Despite being extremely cool, holograms and lenticular gimmick toys never seemed take off in the toy industry, attributed primarily to a lack of interest and high cost of production. I loved holograms as a kid and remember lenticular popularity peaking in the late 90s with things like chip packet lenticulars of Pokemon and Goosebumps. Have you got any holograms in your collection /toy/? Would you buy a modern toy featuring the gimmick?
>>11629315>Have you got any holograms in your collection /toy/?No.>Would you buy a modern toy featuring the gimmick?Hell yes. 80s holograms were cool as shit. The situation reeks of there being an unoffical rule that now limits hologram usage to "authenticity seals" on stuff now. That's crap. The tech had gotten cheap enough to do them for free on cereal boxes and even full magazine covers. Toy-makers would make good money off of full-card limited edition cardbacks.
Still working on completing my Super Naturals collection. Besides maybe two other lines I can't think of any toys that really featured holograms.
I wonder why holograms never took off, how hard could it possibly...oh
>>11629345I just tossed that middle one because the issue was too beat up now. The back even had a holo ad for McD's
>>1162935910k or so to generate the holograms. Honestly not even that bad
>>11629350Very cool.
>>11629359Thety did take off and were everywhere in the 80s and super-early 90s. There were even mall stores that sold nothing but hologram stuff. Thent hey just disappeared for everything but authenticity stickers for electronics, sports wear, and expensive watches.>>11629368Yet the tech got cheap enough for disposable cereal boxes.
I had a lot of Visionaries and Supernaturals as a very young kid. They were cool at the time.
>>11629350I love this line but its so strange. You have 6 figures with barely any thematic cohesion; Sir knight, an Indian, and literally just Thor VS Not skelletor, a snake charmer and an evil knight with a gun. Then to go with those we got two very large fantasy mounts in addition to... monster trucks which the figures just kinda stand in. Then finally a large medieval looking playset. I do wish they got to produce wave 2, the ideas just got more insane.
>>11629498The figures were produced around selling holograms which were cool as shit at the time. And it worked to moderate success, which is the best it could hope for without a half-hour infomercial cartoon promoting it 5 days a week.
>>11629359Went down this rabbit hole a few years back. They're still around, just the gimmick wore off and they became a common place security feature kind of thing.Theres a company that makes a kit to make your own. Kinda pricey (couple hundo) but it does work.>>11629368Less than that. Lasers are dirt cheap these days. The holographic film is a bit pricey if you want a simple no developer required type. I think the kind that requires developing chems is cheaper but comes with the headache of development.The old school way to stabilize the gear is an indoor sandbox, ideally on the basement level on concrete floor, and you fix all the stufff (object, plate, mirrors, laser) on the sand so its stable then set a timer for the laser and leave the room allowing the air to settle. Sound waves and air movement fucks that shit up. Not hard to do DIY. Its just not a very popular hobby anymore because its like normal photography with more steps and lots more limitations. Read up on holography. Shit is fun. Wish I had money to burn on it.
>>11629784Im really interesting doing it and incorporating it into some small projects. The general advice so far is that getting a laser with a workable coherence length, low temporal coherence and high spatial coherence is tricky though without spending around 3-4k in addition to costs associated with the workbench, working space, spatial filtering, thermal control if you want a decent exposure. It's very cool though and I only started looking into it this year. >>11629507I've got some experience with modelling and casting so my plan was to mess around with designing and casting a 5 POI sofubi figure in transparent materials with some suspensions. The body and head would be cast in two halves so I could laminate holograms between them inside the torso and head reasonably close to the surface. If producing the figures wasn't too costly after the initial setup I wanted work on resurrecting some of the Super Naturals prototypes that were designed for the second wave.
>>11629350Never heard of these, what an awesome idea.
>>11629315Because most if them are just gimmicks at the end of the day. You pick it up once, go "oh, cool" and then banish it to the depths of the toy chest. It's rarely integrated into actual play or an aesthetic of a toy.I had a couple but I hardly remember what they even were. I wouldn't mind seeing it return, as long as it had more substance than just a hologram visual.
Im going to dump some compilation images of prototypes and the original hologram concepts from the Super Naturals line. Images are mostly from another collector who managed to acquire them from the original designers.
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>>11630078Figures from series 1 were planned to be re-released in series 2 with an updated full face plate design to re-use previous tooling.
>>11630080Interestingly series 2 had leg articulation planned, the prototypes currently live at Cincy Toy Museum.
>>11630081Concepts for an unusually scaled third mount, a centaur with a massive human torso.
>>11630083Series 3 or canned designs that failed to make it to the prototype phase.
>>11630084Some of the later slate stage concepts that appear to be the villains for series 2. Unsure if these ever had prototypes like the heroes.
>>11629350Neat. Looks like you're only missing the Tomb of Doom variant with the gitd skull.
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>>11630119Just a few ghostling concepts left>>11630091Besides one guy that I've found who might have one spare "for the right price" but never elaborated further I've had zero leads on the GID skull. Can't even get a picture of it to come up in google searches. Ill be hunting down MOCs of the main figures in the meantime and trying to find some of the comics. I'd love to find some britbong with the whole set.
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>>11629359The build up is expensive. It only becomes cheap with higher production numbers. Thats why credit cards can use it. One kind of hologram for hundred thousand cards.
>>11630121Funny how they created such detailed figures to turn it into a hologram.
>>11630161I just assumed that these holograms were printed, take a series of images of a 3D model at slightly different angles, load them up and a have a laser expose or engrave them sequentially across the surface. So what every very single hologram is actually exposed slowly with a set up like this from a meter away? Seems insane. Do you turn the laser off and rotate the object bit by bit? I didn't realise how manual and tricky this process is.
>>11630195Printed? I get that it is mostly a model and they shoot a laser at it. Thats why the figure in the hologram is 3D, because the light reflects differently. As far as i understand it, when you partly laser at it and rotate it, you get a 2D flat image. Maybe like the texture for a 3D videogame.
