This Camera Turns Anything Into a GIF

Regardless of its ambiguous pronunciation, the GIF has become the Internet's finest contribution to the world since attainable pornography and cats with funny faces. The OTTO is a Kickstarter project that celebrates this wonderful means of expression by giving us a camera that can turn anything into a GIF with total ease. 

Making a GIF is quick and easy. First find something to shoot. A rotating crank pops up and folds out from its top. Twist it to make a GIF and then rewind the crank. That's it. The process is finished and you now have a GIF. The OTTO automatically syncs to your phone for easy sharing through social media. 

You can also use OTTO to make photo booth style pictures, time-lapses, or something totally new. The beauty of this camera is that it was built to be hacked — like, nineties sci-fi movie style computer hacking. You can adjust the frame rate, loop time, exposure, saturation, and there's even room for a flash.

Here's some super technical stuff ripped straight from the team's Kickstarter page: OTTO is powered by the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. It has a 700MHz ARM 11 core, with dual core video co-processor and 1080p30 native H.264 hardware encode/decode, advanced Image Sensor Pipeline, 4GB on onboard flash memory, USB 2.0, and a ton of good stuff. If you understood any of that, you're gonna have a good time. 

Made by a team of developers with backgrounds in product design, mechanical engineering, software development, and electronics, OTTO isn't a novelty item. This camera is a seriously well-built tool for photographers that will take epic photos. But if you want to use it for a time-lapse of you eating a sandwich, no one will be offended.


Jeremy Glass is the Vice editor for Supercompressor and has over twelve rolls of used film that he has to get developed.