I t would seem that the Glowforge could make these patterns if we knew how they were constructed. Anyone know?
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Oh I know this one! The image is created by taking two images and slicing them up then mixing them together like you were shuffling cards. Then you take a piece of, say, acrylic and you black out every other section of the same width as the slices you made of the two images. Now when you place this on top you will entirely block one image or the other. When you slide it across you end up with a sort of stop motion effect
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These work a lot like motion GIFs. Your brain fills in the parts in between to make it appear like motion. The lines are spaced so the black opaque parts cover one part of the picture, for example the gear in one position. But only the parts of the gear in that position that show through the clear parts of the grid are drawn. As the grid is slowly moved you only see one frame at a time and your brain fills in the rest. It looks like a slow motion film. A bit like the old kinescopes. - Rich
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My first instinct is to guess that there are a few still frames, each spliced up into slivers the same width as the gaps of the paper being moved above. The spliced frames are lined up like, 1st slice of 1 frame, 1st slice of 2nd frame, 1st slice of 3rd frame, and so on, so that when the paper is held over you only see one frame through the gaps, then as the paper is moved you see each sequential frame.
Edit: y’all beat me to it! hahaha
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I had to type fast, there’s so many smart people around here
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As everyone has pointed out this is similar to the lenticular based moving images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing
wikipedia says it’s called kinemation/kinegrams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinegram
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I envision making a long version of this and wrapping it around in a circle to make a lamp. The inside or outside would have to move slowly, of course.
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ooh, it would be particularly neat if the heat of the lamp provided the energy for rotation.
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My engineer imagination is going now you guys… - Rich
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I could make a fishbowl with moving fish. I wonder if holograms work when sliced up.
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I just answered my own question. Old style holographic memory crystals from 30 years back used lithium niobate in a solid crystalline form as the storage medium. Today, they connect slices together. They do it, if I remember correctly, to remove the places where different data nodes intersect. They were supposed to have a data storage capacity of one hundred million gigabytes per cubic inch and even when broken into pieces, all of the data could be retrieved, albeit at a lower resolution. I somewhat believe that supercapacitive graphene layers arranged in this fashion might be the key to the transporter buffer I am so fond of talking about.
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and that is pretty darn close to a zoetrope
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Oh, by the way, thank you all for your explanations to me.
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Karl D.D. Willis did have a way to download his source code so you could make your own but I’m not finding it on his website anymore 
I’ve heard of them as moire patterns but I like kinemation!
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I’m not sure if it’s best to edit my original post or reply to it (you can see which way I chose), but I was able to find and figure out how I made a moire pattern almost a year ago using his source code, a software program called Processing, and a few images. I could upload those files (maybe…not sure if I can upload files here) and give a little tutorial on it (he has a GNU license on it that looks like I’d be able to do this). It’s pretty simple to run what he made.
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There are a lot of thought provoking projects in that link!
Yes. I am sad it’s missing. It was a killer business card.