

Seems like the community around Lottie is growing, how you are organizing that? Brandon Withrow the iOS engineer who wrote Lottie-iOS came up with the name as a homage to her. She was a director and animator who made the first feature length animated film in 1926 about ten years before Walt Disney. Lottie is named after Charlotte Reiniger. We love the branding around the project, how did yall come up with that? With both platforms at play, we were able to make long strides and Lottie became a real usable tool.

#THE NOUN PROJECT CROSS SECTION ANDROID#
Once we got simple shapes and animation to start working, we brought in Gabriel Peal from the Android side so we can have a cross platform solution, which is when it really started to take off. We started testing it, playing around with it, and he got somethings to go into After Effects from iOS. There really wasn’t an easy and streamlined approach to creating animations for products, which is why we ultimately came up with this tool.Ībout a year ago I sat down with our iOS engineer, Brandon Withrow, and started playing around with Bodymovin, the After Effects extension. You can import an animated GIF into a project but a GIF has issues with transparency, often times files sizes are massive or a developer has to write thousands of lines of code to make it work. I think before we had Lottie, it was really difficult to get the simplest animation into your product because engineers had to make everything from scratch. What lead you and your team to work on this project?

The extension is coupled with a Javascript player that can render the animations on the web very easily. The data you export from After Effects is held in each JSON file using an extension called Bodymovin. In other words, like a Quicktime player that plays MP4s, Lottie is a player that plays JSON files. Lottie is an iOS, Android, and React Native Library that takes After Effects animations and renders them simply, allowing native apps to use your animations as easily as any static image file. “I like to think of myself as a concept artist.” We’ve seen the buzz around Lottie, can you tell us what it is? I like to think of myself as a concept artist. Those may or may not get used, a lot of times it’s exploratory. This means helping teams prototype how we are going to get from one screen to the next. Other projects I work on revolve around UI animation. I do two different types of projects at Airbnb - one is like what I did for Modern Pictograms, where I take assets and animate them which will then go into the product. I’m a design lead here, basically an individual contributor but my primary focus is on motion animation. We’re testing it with school children to learn more about what makes sense to them and what doesn’t.īuilding on this we will be developing a series of mini-explainers aimed at children, illustrating some of the pitfalls and quirks of some AI systems.Hi Salih! Thanks for taking time to chat with us. Below is a screenshot of an experimental bird identification AI, incorporating the ability to experiment, and showing uncertainty, understandable features and explaining the data and its biases. We are building prototypes to explore new ways to explain AI. When it does go wrong, it can have real-world consequences from exam results to job applications to police surveillance and incarceration. It can also be profoundly misused, amplifying human biases or lending credibility to dubious goals. It might have biases or errors accidentally incorporated from training data or other AI code, which can’t be fixed like a bug. It goes wrong in unusual and unpredictable ways, not really in ways that humans fail. It’s partly the nature of the technology, it’s even hard for the experts and practitioners to understand exactly what’s going on inside it. It’s hard to explain how AI works, or how particular AI systems come to decisions. Even for obvious examples, like searching for photos of dogs on your phone, there’s no indication that it uses AI, let alone how it uses this technology. AI is often powering decisions and predictions in systems but often we’re not aware of it. Voice assistants, TV recommendations, news feeds, photo search, insurance, health diagnoses - it’s all around us. AI is ubiquitous, and affects almost all of us in so many areas.
