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Whenever I see a gif, I feel something is missing.
That is the SOUND.
That missing motivated me to blend the sound with gif.
And I believe if I season it with some interactions, it would be wonderful.
GIFi is the more interactive GIF supporting such sounds and interactions.
The currently used GIF versions is 89a, which means the last update was done in 1989. Even if it is a super grandfather in computer tech area, it is surprisingly still alive. The secret key of its longevity is its own user experience. A GIF image contains a couple of image frames which compose a short animation. The animation repeats infinitely, and it is not required to be high resolution and contain many frames. Its short repeating animation gives a kind of rhythmical feeling. Its lightness makes it more portable and users easy to consume.
These unique experiences are cool but the computer technologies grew up too much for 25 years. Also other image formats are born very long time ago, although some of them have recent updates. Finally, I recognized that most of the contemporary image formats do not take account of the mobile computing environment.
To provide rich mobile experience, image should take account for user experiences using features like animations, sounds and interactions. The goal of GIFi is to support such features by expanding the GIF file format.
GIFi expresses sounds as circles called, Sound Circle. Sound circles enable GIFi to be audible and interactive. To support the new file format, I implemented four tools, creator, encoder, decoder, and player. gifi4j implements all four tools in Java. gifi4js implements decoder and player in Javascript.
- creator: helps user to blend sounds and interactions to existing GIF.
- encoder: encodes sound schedules and sound circles created by the user into GIFi binary.
- decoder: translates GIFi binary and restores the GIFi instance.
- player: plays GIFi.
GIFi would be the first image format which seamlessly includes audio with short animation. And it would be the first image format supporting interactivity without any "serious" and "heavy" machines like flash player, java VM, and so on.
I should finish my first implementation, first. And then, I will think of more application scenarios and supporting asynchronous sounds.