Google has been bringing in new features to Chromebooks quite regularly, and a new one seems to be on the way. This new feature will let you add an animated profile picture to your account. The Mountain View, California-based company calls this new feature Motion Stills – named after the Android and iOS app with the same name. As of now, when users go to the Chrome OS settings menu on their Chromebooks and click on their account image, they get an option to capture a still that will be used as the profile image for their accounts. This new, upcoming option will, reportedly, be available in that very same menu. How, will these ‘Motion Stills’ work, exactly? Well, according to the official changelog, 10 pictures will be taken over an interval of 1 second, which will later be stitched together and then play in a loop, which will animate them, in a way. The total animation time is said to be 1 minute, with the playback running at 20 frames per second (FPS).
Motion Stills, developed by Google, is already a popular app that was released for iOS in 2016 and for Android in July this year. With its comparatively late release on the Play Store, the app saw some improvements over its iOS’s counterpart with the introduction of a new feature called the Fast Forward mode. This mode lets you speed up the video from two to eight times the original speed, even if it is a minute-long video. This is in addition to the standard feature that allows you to create GIFs with three-second video loops. Having brought an implementation of the app to Chrome OS now, Google is expected to utilize this feature in a more fitting way on Chromebooks.
Google didn’t specify an exact date as to when this new feature will be rolled out to the stable channel of Chrome OS, but you can expect it to be arriving soon on the Canary channel. Users on the Dev and Beta channels of Chrome OS can also expect to get their hands on this new feature soon after it arrive to the Canary channel.