Gif Cube

April 28, 2018 — .gif

Turn any gif into a cube with Gif Cube. That’s right! A physical cube of gif. Like holding the internet. Now you finally know what your life has been missing all these years.

Links

The site lets you turn almost any gif into a gif cube. You can order gif cubes in two sizes: 1.5 inch and 2.5 inch. The rainbow colored cube in the example is a 1.5 incher, and it’s bigger than the number makes it sound.

What is a gif cube exactly? Well, to summarize: take a gif, extrude each frame out in the third dimension, and boom! Gif cube.

This project takes the idea of cube.gif and makes it physical. That’s something I had always intended to do, but I had no idea how to do it in a scalable way.

So when I started playing around with selling custom products online a few months back, I ended up launching gif-slice first, even though I didn’t think gif slices would be an appealing product to most people (I still think slices are pretty neat). Printing 2D slices of gif cubes just seemed a whole lot easier than manufacturing the cubes themselves. And while you could probably handmake the gif cubes just by like gluing six printouts to a cardboard box, I also was looking for a manufacturing process that I could completely outsource.

Then I discovered the magic of colored sandstone 3D printing. This manufacturing process is total overkill, but it does make the cubes themselves really unique. The gifs here aren’t just printed or glued on to the surface of the cube, the colors are actually embedded into the material itself. Even the interiors of the cubes are fully colored. The results are surprisingly vibrant too, and higher resolution that I would have thought possible. (One obvious downside of 3D printing is that costs escalate very quickly with size.)

While it may sound like I’m trying to sell the cubes pretty hard, it’s only because I really do find them incredibly cool. You can even stick small lights inside of them to create glowing gif nightlights!

Try using the site to cube some random gifs from giphy, even if you aren’t interested in ordering a physical cube. The results can be surprisingly awesome, and it will make you see gifs in a whole new way.