Another step closer to Harry Potter style living portraits in the news. Some day we'll be good enough at building a 3D scene from a video or a bunch of 2D pictures that we'll be able to animate the scene and the people in various random ways rather than just looping a video clip.

The Onion is gonna get really interesting once that's all developed.

I do feel it's a bit distracting from the content for me; not every picture is gif-like, and I found myself scrolling to animated ones. I'd like to know how 'average' people would like the content presentation, from a reader standpoint, not a hacker standpoint.

I thought it was pretty tastefully done. It could certainly be abused as an effect, but overall I think this is what 'newspapers' are going to look like in the decades to come.

The gif made the experience even better for me.

Huh, for some reason the gifs don't play back Chromium for me (within Ubuntu, at least) but do work from Firefox.

They are not actually gifs, they are html video tags.