Trialled by Daniel Zuboff

Strategy at Loomery

These days if you want to hold people’s attention, pretty pictures won’t cut it. If you’re tired of just using images, AI can come to the rescue, injecting a little novelty or excitement into a presentation or a website. Enter LeiaPix, a free-to-use online tool for converting a 2D image into a 2.5D animation with a parallax effect.

The workflow is very simple, find a regular image that you want to animate, upload it to the LeiaPix website, and choose the direction and intensity of the parallax effect. The result is a moving image that adds depth and visual interest to any project. This tool is perfect for anyone looking to spice up their visuals without having to spend a lot of time or money on complicated animation software.

Let's demonstrate with an example. Loomery releases a fortnightly compilation focusing on all-things Metaverse: Meta Mondays. The format is already visually appealing but lets see what LeiaPix can do.

Here’s a relevant image of someone wearing a high-end VR headset by the company Bigscreen — the same people behind the popular video-watching app for those who enjoy looking at content in a virtual environment. Let’s upload it to the site.

The AI automatically separates the image from the background and generates a depth map, enabling it to create these kinds of gifs, which can then be inserted into websites and presentations. Unfortunately the maximum output resolution is kind of low, resulting in a grainy compressed looking image, but you can also choose to output an mp4 which has a much higher resolution.

If you’re not satisfied with the way the AI has mapped different elements of the image to different depths, you can always go in and tweak them yourself for more realistic results. You can also change the pattern the camera takes, as well as how fast and how pronounced you’d like the effect to be.

Pretty fun stuff! Let’s finish with a few more examples: