2020.03.29
Jesus, everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end.
The game Ducks Ahoy has this crazy charm - I feel there wasn't much "pixel art" back then as cute as this:
Back in the 80s, holograms were really a big thing - impressive ones the size of greeting cards, not these little dinky stickers on credit cards or whatever. You'd have carefully-lit kiosks at the mall selling them.
I took an after-hours class in making them in sixth grade! You need an elaborate setup to do it properly: a laser, special photographic plates, a dark room, and a sand table to dampen vibration. For the final project, we could select pile of small object. For some reason I was in a pretentious "minimalism is cool" phase (this was around the same time I was trying to convince myself I loved classical and jazz because that's what smart people liked and I was a smart person) and while other students made these cool still lifes with a digital watch, a chess piece, etc, I just had some marbles and magnetic washers.
Lesson learned: sometimes less is less.
Kind of the same thing with "Magic eye" puzzles in the 90s... I remember small specialty storefronts full of nothing but them, and the first time I "saw it", my eyes just sinking into a very large landscape portrait of the white house, on a band field trip. It was astounding!
But holograms needed careful lighting and attention and magic eye puzzles are there own challenge. 3D movies are still a novelty, 3D TVs never took off (both of those needing glasses) and the Nintendo 3DS' ability to do 3D without glasses is a bit wonky. I guess 3D isn't that important to us, not enough for us to make many compromises for anyway.