GIFs Reach New Heights (or Depths)

Oh, GIF. You’ve come a long way since your inception in the 1980s, nabbing that coveted Word of the Year honor in 2012, befuddling us with your hotly contested pronunciation, and now, thanks to some talented redditors, going places we never thought you could: the third dimension.

Split Depth GIFs, a subreddit devoted to GIFs that seem to defy the laws of computer graphics, is a treasure trove of visual trickery.There’s a range of animated images, some cool, some death-defying and some just downright creepy, withelementsthatpop out at you like the altered graphics of a 3-D movie would. But they’re not 3-D. They’re not even reallyanydifferent from the countlessother GIFs that populate the internet.Insteadofentertaining you with, say, an animation ofBeyonc Obama dancing on a pizza, though, they’re images that already have a pretty vast depth of field, which is further accentuatedbywhite horizontal or vertical lines that are added in for that specific purpose.

Though the subreddit has been around sinceNovember 4, 2013, it mostly flew under the radar untila user named zeusju1ce discovered the subreddit on Monday and posted this GIF— where else? —on reddit. The rest, as they say, is history. Or, in this case, GIFstory.

Check out some of our favorite dimension-bending GIFs, below:

Thisoverly curious cat cannot be contained by imgur.

Is thismajesticshuttle blasting off into outer space or directlyinto my eyeballs?

The scene from Bad Boys that started it all.

This clown creature, which will likely haunt your dreams forever. You’re welcome.

This man seems like he wants to get to know you bette — OH MY GOD HE’S COMING RIGHT AT YOURFACE LOOK OUT!

Ready to take last year’s reaction GIFsto a new level? Check the Split-Depth GIFs page, as more users are giving GIFs the 3-Dtreatment and posting their mind-bending masterpieces for all to see.

Thanks, Joel!