MyWiki:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 February 17

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February 17

How does Instagram make hearts like smoke?

Someone was watching a live video on a TV series I was watching. I think the site was Instagram. On the right side there were lots of hearts moving upward like smoke.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:11, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

• Many ways. A typical way is to do it client-side (on the viewer's browser) with JavaScript and CSS. Each "heart" is a HTML <div> created by some JavaScript. The background image of that is set to a shared image wallpaper (a small heart), which is transparent around the heart shape. The position of this <div> is then modified by the script to float upwards. Often there's some tiny text in there too. I'm sure that a floating hearts script is downloadable.[1]

This script does it by drawing hearts in CSS as boxes, no image file [2]

Or (for a big site) it's done on the server. The same thing happens, but it's rendered onto the video stream at the source. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:23, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. I assumed it was something standard with whatever site it was.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:37, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Are you asking how the site achieves this effect on a technical level?

Or are you just asking what the hearts represent? I believe Facebook Live does something similar. Viewers press one of the "like" buttons, and they show up as floating particles. If a stream is really popular, there might be a non-stop cloud of "likes" going by.

(BTW, If this was on a TV series, they probably used some fake generic-brand social media. They don't like to use brand-name products unless they're being sponsored.) ApLundell (talk) 03:06, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

I actually was wondering about what that was on the right. I can't remember what TV series or I would link to the video.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:44, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

You might be able to do it with CSS alone, see CSS animations. In the olden days it used to be done with Flash... 89.172.57.225 (talk) 22:25, 18 February 2020 (UTC)