flixel

English

Etymology

Blend of floating +‎ pixel. The origins may come from cinemagraphs in the fashion industry in the early 2010s.

Noun

flixel (plural flixels)

1. An image, that combines a photo, and a video element that is looped to give the illusion of movement.
   • 2014 June 2, Roman Loyola, “WWDC: Apple Design Awards winners for 2014”, in Macworld:

     Cinemagraph Pro: A professional graphics tool for creating “flixels”—combinations of video and photo.

   • 2014 June 3, Kaylene Hong, “Apple honors Yahoo News Digest, Storehouse and other apps in its annual Design Awards”, in The Next Web:

     Other than the above iOS apps, Apple also recognized the best Mac apps — journaling app Day One and photography app Cinemagraph Pro, which helps you create flixels.

   • 2017 May 12, Peter Corboy, “armand dijcks' enchanting cinemagraphs capture the raw power of the ocean waves”, in Design Boom:

     armand dijcks created the pieces by manipulating ray collins’ still images in adobe after effects, before using flixel cinemagraph pro to complete the animation.

2. An image that is projected into the air by a floating drone.
   • 2014 August 27, Andrea Peterson, “Disney filed a patent for ‘blimp-sized’ puppets controlled by drones. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be in parks soon.”, in The Washington Post:

     While all the patent filings mention the need for safety features, the manipulation of giant marionettes and droves of flying screens or "flixels" in close proximity to huge crowds of families seems like exactly the kind of use that might raise concerns from regulators.

   • 2014 August 28, Evan Ackerman, “Disney Research Patents ETH Zurich's PuppetCopter”, in IEEE Spectrum:

     I think Disney's clever idea to call them "flixels" is cool, though, and if they can pull together enough flixels to form an actual flying display, that would be seriously impressive, since even a basic flying display with a QQVGA resolution (160x120) would need 19,200 (!) individual flying robots.

   • 2015, Daniel R. Faust, Entertainment Drones, page 20:

     Engineers working for Disney theme parks want to use drones as “flixels,” or flying pixels.

   • 2020 November 19, C Wong, JA Stark, RS Trowbridge, Aerial display system with floating pixels‎^[1], US Patent 20159169030:

     The aerial display system makes use of the concept of a “flixel” or floating pixel (of a flying pixel object).

Anagrams

• exfill