Method and device for the generation of printed graphic patterns for exhibiting movie pictures to moving observers by means of a static optical apparatus

A method for generating printed images of a graphic pattern of a movie picture to be displayed for moving observers using a long display panel composed of said graphic pattern and a plate made up of a plurality of cylinder converging lenses arranged parallel to each other with a common focal plane, comprising:

• a) storing a succession of digital data blocks corresponding to individual frames in digital code of the movie picture to be displayed and assigning a label to each of these digital data blocks that identifies its position in a cinematographic sequence;
• b) defining an integer variable q which can assume Npages values, where initially q is set to its first value, where each page is a printed unit of the graphic pattern and Npages is the total number of pages of the graphic pattern;
• c) generating a two-dimensional array of byte sets, able to be recognized as a blank image in a definite digital graphical format, of size (Nlensesp)×H, where the array can be thought of as formed by Nlenses adjacent sectors of size p×H (hereafter, fringes) and is labeled by a name (page-) together with the correlative number q, where Nlenses is the number of lenses in the lenticular plate, p is the distance between fringes in the graphic pattern, and H is the height of a fringe;
• d) calling successively and resizing on calling the data blocks, or byte arrays representing the movie frames in digital format by a graphical resize sub-routine to a size w×H, in array or pixel units, where w≦p, where each time a frame is called and resized it is pasted repeatedly in Nrep consecutive fringes of the page-q array, where w is the size in the principal direction of a fringe;
• e) once the Nlenses fringes of the page-q array are all filled by resized frames, closing the array and storing as a digital image, replacing the value of q with the next value in the succession, if available, and the process returns to step c), and if step e) occurs before the pasting of the Nrep resized copies of a frame is completed, the preparation of the next page will start pasting the residual copies to complete the Nrep ones, where Nrep is number of repetitions of the fringes associated with each frame of the movie picture;
• f) eventually, pasting a small identification image containing the number q before closing and storing the page-q array;
• g) if no next value of q is available in the succession of Npages elements the process does not return to step c), but ends.