We’re entering a new dimension of GIFs.
A relaunched Giphy Cam app on iOS dubbed Giphy Cam 2.5 will allow users to place animations next to real-life footage. The “stickers” will follow you or your friends around in three dimensions, pivoting Giphy from simple 2D animations and into a sort of augmented reality. You can save your loops and share them with your friends via text message, Instagram, Google Hangouts, whatever.
The stickers will remind you of Pokmon Go, which uses your phone’s camera and screen to superimpose critters like Squirtle and Pikachu into the real world. Giphy didn’t get too specific about its secret sauce in a conversation with Mashable, but the stickers occupy a three-dimensional layer, so they can rotate and zoom in sync with your movements.
“AR is a super interesting technology,” Ralph Bishop, Giphy’s head of design, told Mashable. “We’re going to keep chasing this.”
Mashable had a chance to play with the app ahead of its launch Thursday. Like those in the original Giphy Cam, the effects will probably make more sense if you’re kind of buzzed they’ve got that Ren & Stimpy flavor and there’s a lot to play with. Take a look:
Augmented reality, you may have noticed, is the hot thing in app development these days. It’s what makes Pokmon Go special, it’s what makes Snapchat “Lenses” work and it doesn’t require a dorky headset. Apple CEO Tim Cook said last week that we may eventually wonder “how we lived without it.”
Giphy is tapping into that with its new version of Giphy Cam, which lets you splice ridiculous animations into your surroundings. It’s cool enough that you’ll share the clips with your friends, which is the whole point.
That’s a simple use-case. Giphy Cam may not seem like world-changing technology, what with its boogery frames and stoner-eye filters, but Bishop and team have a legitimate vision.
“I love what Snapchat’s doing, but it’s ephemeral. It’s disposable. It’s cool, but that’s one use-case. With GIFs, we’re building a language,” Bishop told Mashable.
You could write that off as the sort of posturing typical of tech startups, but he has a point. GIFs are everywhere, and they have been forever: you’ll find them in Facebook stickers, news articles and tweets. Apple’s latest version of iOS 10 even equipped its Messages app with a built-in tool to search for them while texting.
A simple animation of a cat eating pizza doesn’t inherently mean anything, but it becomes imbued with purpose, however silly, when you jam it into a new context.
This is me saying, “I’d really rather not have a salad but I’m not going to be a jerk about it.”
Image: Damon Beres/Mashable
Understanding that, Giphy continues to carve a space for itself as the provider of GIFs so many of us communicate with. Its site is the 199th most-popular in the United States by Alexa’s measurement and the 275th worldwide. Its apps build on that foundation to spread animations to other services like Instagram or iMessage: the mission isn’t to overtake them.
“Giphy Cam is meant to be a utility app, not a social network,” Julie Logan, Giphy’s director of brand strategy, told Mashable. “Being a complement to your life is the goal.”
“We love seeing short session times,” Bishop added, referring to the number of seconds someone uses Giphy Cam for when they open the app. “It means that you were able to use the camera in under a minute, get in, get out, and get back to your message. Other apps are different because they want to lock you in.”
A surprisingly robust tool
If you want to get lost in Giphy Cam 2.5, you can. While it’s easy to jump in and out, there are a number of unadvertised features that can suck you in.
For example, it’s not clear that you can bring outside GIFs into the app for use with its AR function. You can copy and paste them from Giphy’s website into the app, Bishop said, but you can also install the Giphy Keys app to search and insert from Giphy Cam itself. Just tap the “Hi” text at the bottom of the Giphy Cam window, switch over to the Giphy keyboard and search for a keyword plus the word “sticker.”
Image: Damon Beres/Mashable
There are other features, too, like the ability to turn Live Photos into GIFs and convert PNG images into stickers. But there isn’t much hand-holding, apparently on purpose.
“We wanted a sense of surprise, things you discover,” Bishop said. “We wanted friends to see and be curious and ask ‘how are you putting things on my face?’ It’s a bit hidden.”
If you want to dig around, Giphy Cam 2.5 is available on iOS Thursday. It will drop as an update to the existing Giphy Cam app, so you don’t need to download something new if you’re an existing user.
Giphy is simultaneously launching the original flavor of Giphy Cam sans 3D stickers for Android. Bishop said that version should catch up to its older iOS brother in the next few months.
