In the movie Back to the Future II, a gigantic shark from a mock Jaws sequel springs out of a theater marquee and engulfs Michael J. Fox. Now, a Canadian company has developed a way to print lifelike holographic posters that could make that kind of eye-catching advertising possible.

Last week, 10 U.S. theaters rolled out full-color 3-D posters with motion and photorealistic detail to promote the movie How She Move. Made by Quebecois company RabbitHoles, the advertisements feature one of the film's characters tearing up the dance floor in an eight-second clip that can be "played" in 3-D by walking from left to right of the poster. Despite the images' slightly transparent quality, what you see is pretty close to the real thing.

"The sensation you first get when you look at this is your mouth automatically responding with, 'Oh my God,'" says Michael Page, visiting professor at the University of Toronto's Institute for Optical Sciences and a RabbitHoles board member.

Holographic imagery is becoming more common these days, from the fraud deterrents on credit cards to National Geographic's 3-D magazine covers. However, these images have been limited with respect to color, resolution, viewing angle and size. RabbitHoles' new technology takes the crisp, detailed 2-D images we're used to seeing on computer and TV screens and translates them into full-color, 3-D images.

"Up until now, 3-D advertising hasn't always been done very well," says M2 Research analyst Wanda Meloni. "The technology has just been evolving and we're just starting to touch the surface of 3-D being incorporated into our everyday lives."

Rather than simple static images, RabbitHoles' can take six- to eight-second movie clips from 2-D and 3-D films and print them into a poster that "moves" as the viewer walks past. RabbitHoles poster art unveiled at Comic-Con in July features pop surrealist painter Ron English’s iconic character Cathy Cowgirl as she flirtatiously cocks her head, lifts her pistol, and fires a shot – all while her udders slightly shudder.

To produce the imagery, RabbitHoles creates a 3-D computer model of the object that will be turned into a hologram. A virtual camera takes snapshots at different angles, and a software algorithm developed by RabbitHoles calculates how light would bounce off each angle in the scene. The result is up to 1,280 different snapshots, or frames, that not only hold color, distance and angle info, but light patterns as well.

To record the actual hologram onto a sheet of film, the data is sent to a printer that divides each frame into pixels – a poster-size print can hold up to 700,000. The company then exposes each pixel with red, green and blue pulsed lasers.

If the hologram is destined to become framed artwork, it's mounted on Plexiglas, but it can be mounted on virtually anything. At the Los Angeles Auto Show last month, Scion's promotional vehicle had windows exploding with artwork by English.

The development of the RGB pulsed laser was key to RabbitHoles' process. Previous systems used either a continuous-wave laser or a single-color pulsed laser. The former employs a low-intensity light that requires a long exposure time lasting from less than a second to a few minutes. Any vibration during filming can lead the laser and the film to slightly shift, diminishing the hologram's resolution.

In contrast, pulsed lasers flash for just 1/10,000,000 of a second, so getting a clear image is much easier. But up until now, pulsed lasers were monochromatic. RabbitHoles' newly engineered RGB pulsed laser offers the best of both worlds – crisp images in full color.

In the future, doctors may even use RabbitHoles' technology to visualize the human body.

"Much of our work in the area of scientific and medical imaging is now in 3-D," says Page. "Once we're able to accurately parse a variety of forms of medical data into this process, we will be able to provide researchers and surgeons with more detailed visualization of the data. This could save lives."