The Microsoft Paper Clip is talking to me. Or at least a more colorful version of him is. He’s ordering me to paint pizza around the room and I have no choice but to comply, so I do. Glorious, stodgy slices of pizza dripping with cheese and lined around the walls, folding towards the end where they can no longer contain the oil pouring off of it. My mouth waters and I long to raid the fridge for something unhealthy.
No, I’m not on drugs, I’m just describing the first few minutes of GIPHY World.
Not to be mistaken with last year’s Museum of GIF Art (though still developed by New York-based Planeta), GIPHY World is like Tilt Brush mixed with memes. It’s a virtual playground in which you can search through GIPHY’s vast library of looping video content and paste them as stickers in one of three environments.
Why would you do this, you ask. Well, why not? The app is free, for one thing, and if you’re the type that likes to make a mockery of the world around you then there isn’t a better tool for doing so. I, for example, did what I always do whenever someone is foolish enough to give reckless creative freedom over something: created an ill-fitting tribute to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Within minutes of being let loose in GIPHY World I’d covered the walls of a giant chess board with GIFs of Daniel Day Lewis screaming about milkshakes in poor Eli’s face. It was a wonderous, bordering on creep shrine to Daniel Plainview in the most unexpected of ways. I loved it.
Of course, if you can’t see what the point in doing something like that would be, then GIPHY World is probably not for you.
For those of us that revel in the insanity of the internet, though, this is a wonderful new sandbox. Shake your new logo friend and he’ll vomit pixelated GIFs onto the floor. Resize yourself and then post giant videos that will bear down on your newly-made lands. Grab a camera and record a GIF of your own (including taking selfies that reveal your disturbingly blob-ish avatar).
It’d be great to see some form of multiplayer support included in the future (I’d love to host a future episode of UploadVR’s new podcast here) as well as more environments
GIPHY World is about as close as you can get to experiencing LSD without actually taking any, and you should absolutely give it a go. It’s entirely unnecessary yet all the more hilarious for it. It’s launching on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive today for free.
