Animated Ads in a Subway Near You
prostoalex writes "A company called Sub Media claims a successful launch of motion-picture ads in New York subway. The ad agency, created by a PhD in Astrophysics, prints ads on Kodak transparencies, so that when the train speeds up, the resulting images create a full-blown motion picture. The first ever ad of this was run for Target in NY, and there is another one planned for Discovery Channel."
Here's a fairly recent article about this from the Boston Globe
(Google cache link, since the original story is now archived)
....which replaced the Target ad. On the PATH train from New Jersey running between 14th and 23rd Street Stations in Manhattan, left side of tunnel.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
They have some videos from news coverage and simulations at their website
The thing you have to keep in mind is you can't just plaster a bunch of frames on the subway walls to make it look animated. They have to use these special lenses that makes each frame always in the same spot relative to you. So the shape of these lenses do the following. You're looking at a frame and it's directly in front of you. Then you move over an inch, and it's still directly in front of you. And then another inch, and again, it's still directly in front of you. Until, the last inch, suddenly the next frame appears exactly where the last frame was: directly in front of you. So it's this continuous thing where there is always a frame *directly* in front of you. If you didn't have those lenses it wouldn't work.
Just came back from Athens, where this is up and running, in full-annoyance mode, showing really cheesy Coca-Cola ads. FWIW, I think this was either on Grammh 2 between Panepistimio and Omonoia or on Grammh 3 between Evaggelismos and Syntagma (or both?).
// zyqqh