Turn up the volume and ignore coworker complaints: you have to hear as well as see this phenomenon in action – they start out in sync but end up all over their magnetized performance surface.

Created by Ugoita T., magnets on the feet of these ordinary-looking gold paper cranes bring them to life – that and the technology buried in the box below that animate them first in unison, as a flock, then individually as one in particular starts tearing up the proverbial dance floor.

And if you liked that strange little performance, you can check out some of his other videos as well, like this 8bit harmonica spiel (to a set of tunes any good geek will recognize quickly).

The post Synchronized Paper Cranes Dance on Electromagnetic Stage first appeared on Gajitz.

GIFs are coming back in a big way, and soon you won’t need to have any special computer skills to make one. OTTO is a customizable camera powered by Raspberry Pi that can make GIFs, time lapses, and other awesome effects in no time with nothing more than its associated smartphone app.

Creating a GIF on the OTTO is as easy as popping up the camera’s crank, twisting it, then rewinding when you’re done. The new GIF is sent to your phone and you can instantly share it with all of your social network. But the OTTO is no one-trick pony; its app has the ability to turn OTTO into plenty of other specialized cameras that can do things like produce instant digital photo booth pictures or apply textures or patterns.

With the Arduino-powered FlashyFlash add-on, users can increase the image quality and even add sound to their creations. The camera itself can be modified almost infinitely through the FlashyFlash simply by adding additional Arduino boards. The OTTO is raising funds on Kickstarter where a pre-order will run you $149, or $199 with an included FlashyFlash.

The post Raspberry Pi Powered Camera Makes its Own Instant GIFs first appeared on Gajitz.

The marvel of the moving picture is now at your fingertips. Remember the first time you drew those sequential stick figures on the outer margins of your 8th-grade copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’? The GIF computer file is sort of the modern version, and a new camera gives you physical copies.

Designer Jiho Jang captured this novel concept with his camera, the GIF-TY. It uses the burst-shot technology of a Polaroid camera and a ‘Zero-Ink’ printer to give you sequential photographs. They print out in a strip that allows you to rip each frame apart and stack in order to make a mini-film. The GIF-TY has a timer that can make the flip books between 1-5 seconds.

The two principle ideas behind a ‘movie’ – persistence of vision and phi phenomenon – are very captivating. Jang seemed to have this in mind when he created GIF-TY. The camera fully realizes this, along with that unique memory GIF-TY helped you create.

The post Fun Movie + Photo Camera Gives You the Gift of Memory first appeared on Gajitz.

Animated GIFs are the bane of many an internet denizen. They are overused and often pretty annoying.  Italian designers Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali have come up with the perfect solution to make GIFs look almost sophisticated.

The Giphoscope is a hand-made device that lets you play analog GIFs of up to 24 frames. Turn the crank and the pictures flip around and around, just like a more complex flip book.

The designers of the Giphoscope custom make each piece with images provided by the customer. They’re kind of like old home movies, except that each Giphoscope will run you 300 Euros, or around $400 US.

The post Old School Analog Flip Book Brings Animated GIFs to Life first appeared on Gajitz.

Back in the early days of the internet, animated GIFs were the bane of just about everyone. Their annoying, jarring graphics and often painfully bright colors were enough to make anyone crazy. Particularly irritating was when they were used as avatars in chat rooms or forums, and we’d have to watch their stupid dancing polar bear dancing or sneezing kitten a thousand times before finally just leaving the page in frustration. Some people still use the unfortunately annoying animated GIFs, but there’s a whole new crop of artists who are using this long-maligned vehicle to express their creativity.

The above GIFs, from artist David Ope (also known online as dvdp) are markedly more mature than those that we raised in the 80s and 90s remember. Their existence doesn’t seem to center on the desire to draw attention or to frustrate; rather, they are simply beautiful, mesmerizing pieces of art.

There’s a certain amount of nostalgia in these pieces; it seems to suggest that the creators grew up in the era where the animated GIF was an ever-present Web element. And although it’s largely fallen out of favor in Web design (thankfully) this new, more mature generation of the animated GIF is taking it in an entirely new, extremely creative direction.

That’s a common theme in this new generation of animated GIFs: they are more art than novelty. Anyone who has seen a tiled animation used as a background for a web page knows that the constant looping motion can quickly become intolerable. But the animated GIFs being created today are more of an underground art movement than a momentary distraction. The above animations from Sweet GIFs come from several different contributors, indicating that there is a thriving community of artists and designers dedicated to preserving and promoting the image format.

The post Animated GIFs: Have They Matured From Annoying to Artsy? first appeared on Gajitz.