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Some or even many of you may not be familiar with Motion Stills. For those of you who aren’t, let me share this awesome little app with you.
Motions Stills is a video and .gif creating app from Google first released for iOS in 2016 then later announced for Android in July of this year. Since that time, we’ve had a lot of fun with Motion Stills around the office.
You can take beautiful 3-second image bursts and the app will convert them to a .gif for you to enjoy and share with your friends. It also allows you to take up to a 1-minute video and condenses it into a fast-forwarded, sometimes hilarious, video.
If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, you can grab it from the Play Store at the link below for free. Thank me later.
Moving on.
What’s all this have to do with Chromebooks? Well, I’m glad you asked.
We reported recently on the upcoming addition of animated avatars for your Chrome OS login screen but now it appears that developers are taking it one step further.
Our good friend +Dinsan Francis from ChromeStory came across the commit that will bring users the capability to capture their own animated avatar via the camera app on their Chromebook.
Not coincidentally, the new feature is labeled “Motion Stills.” From the commit we see exactly how the new option will work.
This takes advantage of the animated image support added recently to allow users to capture short looping high-quality mini videos as avatar picture.
If you are a Facebook newsfeed scroller, you’ve likely seen this animated profile pic becoming more prevalent as of late. Now, you will be able to do the same on all of your Chrome devices. When you click on your account image in the Chrome OS settings menu, capturing a still is already an option. This feature will add the video capture functionality as another choice for your user image.
Here’s how:
- 10 photos taken over the interval of 1 second.
- Stitched together in a seamless forwards/backwards loop.
- Playback at 20 FPS.
- Final animation time is 1 second.
- Playback is 2X the speed of capture.
Pretty cool stuff to add to the list of ever-growing features for Chromebooks. It is unclear when this new animated avatar feature will go live, but I will be heading over to the Canary channel shortly to see what I can find.
Source: ChromeStoryChromium Repository,
