Bringing Keynote Animations to Life in AR: introducing ARgif

I am thrilled to share that ARgif is now available on the App Store, and I think it opens a genuinely exciting door for classrooms.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/argif/id6791771386

If your students can make an animation in Keynote, they can now visualise it in the real world in augmented reality.

For years Keynote has quietly been one of the best animation tools we have in education. Magic Move, build order, drawing tools, transparent slides. Students already use it to animate a beating heart, a water cycle, a running figure, a rotating planet, a story sequence. What has been missing is a simple way to take that animation off the screen and place it into the room. That is the gap ARgif fills.

The workflow is deliberately short, because classroom time is precious:

1. Animate your idea in Keynote. Set the slide background to no fill so it exports with a transparent background.
2. Export the slides as a high resolution animated GIF.
3. Open ARgif, bring in the GIF, and export a USDZ.
4. Tap Preview in AR and place your animation on the floor, on a wall, or inside a picture frame. 

That is it. The USDZ keeps every frame, the exact timing, and the original dimensions, so what students made is exactly what appears in front of them. No accounts, no subscriptions, and everything happens on the device.

Why I think this matters for AR in education. So much AR content has been something students consume, a model someone else built that they orbit around with a camera. ARgif flips that. The animation in the room is theirs. A Year 6 student can animate the phases of the moon and then walk around it. A secondary art class can frame their own animated line drawings as AR gallery pieces on the classroom wall. The camera stops being a viewer and becomes a stage.

A few classroom ideas to get started:

• Science: cycles and processes that are hard to picture as static images.
• Art and design: animated sketches presented as framed, wall mounted works.
• Story and language: a sequence students can literally walk through.
• Maths: rotating shapes and transformations placed on the desk.

ARgif is built for upper primary and secondary, and it is intentionally simple so the focus stays on the thinking, not the tool.

If you give it a try with your students, I would love to hear what they create.

Have a great week everyone.

Paul