I had attempted to recreate this in the past but could never come up with anything elegant. I saw this post not too long ago Recreating the Apple TV icons in JavaScript and CSS by Nash Vail.

He then went on to create a jQuery plugin to accomplish the effect. After reading the source and viewing the demos, it turns out re-making this in React Native is trivial.

So read the article, check out the live demo here and then we'll continue on.

What are we building

Setup

var React = require ( 'react-native' ); var { AppRegistry, StyleSheet, Text, View, PanResponder, Image, Animated } = React; var width = 280 ; var height = 150 ;

Yes, Animated again. Can you believe I almost wrote this tutorial with out it? I had a setState implementation but I didn't take the lazy, non-performant way out, I built it with performance in mind! No thanks necessary, it would have weighed on my conscience had I released an animated tutorial using setState .

The card we're animating is 280 by 150 . It'll play into our calculations. This could be made dynamic though.

Defaults

getInitialState: function () { return { maxRotation: 12 , maxTranslation: 6 , perspective: 800 }; },

In our getInitialState we'll set up some defaults. We'll set our maxRotation to 12, this means the card can only rotate a maximum of 12 degrees. maxTranslation is the same thing, it can only shift the card a maximum of 6.

You can read more about perspective here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/perspective.

The perspective CSS property determines the distance between the z = 0 plane and the user in order to give to the 3 D - positioned element some perspective

Borrowed Function

function calculatePercentage ( offset , dimension ) { return (( - 2 / dimension) * offset) + 1 ; }

This is the magic formula. Based upon what we pass in here it will spit out a value between -1 and 1 . We use this to multiply by our maxRotation or maxTranslation to get the degree to apply. We won't do the multiplication though, we'll let Animated take care of that.

PanResponder and Calculations

componentWillMount: function () { this._animations = { xRotationPercentage: new Animated . Value ( 0 ), yRotationPercentage: new Animated . Value ( 0 ), xTranslationPercentage: new Animated . Value ( 0 ), yTranslationPercentage: new Animated . Value ( 0 ) } this._panResponder = PanResponder. create ({ onStartShouldSetPanResponder : ( evt , gestureState ) => true , onStartShouldSetPanResponderCapture : ( evt , gestureState ) => true , onMoveShouldSetPanResponder : ( evt , gestureState ) => true , onMoveShouldSetPanResponderCapture : ( evt , gestureState ) => true , onPanResponderMove : ( e , gestureState ) => { e. persist (); var { locationX: x, locationY: y } = e.nativeEvent; this._animations.xRotationPercentage. setValue ( calculatePercentage (y, height)); this._animations.yRotationPercentage. setValue ( calculatePercentage (x, width) * - 1 ); this._animations.xTranslationPercentage. setValue ( calculatePercentage (x, width)); this._animations.yTranslationPercentage. setValue ( calculatePercentage (y, height)); } }) },

Alright there is sort of a lot here but not really. We setup an object to hold our animations called this._animations . We then setup our PanResponder defaults, and of course the one we care about is onPanResponderMove .

Here when it moves we get the locationX and locationY which is the x/y values relative to the component we attach it too.

Finally we run our calculations and call setValue on each Animated.Value . This is basically what Animated.event is doing under the hood for us, but instead we are performing calculations and calling setValue ourselves.

Render-me-timbers

render: function () { return ( < View style = {styles.container}> < View style = {{width: width, height: height}} { ... this._panResponder.panHandlers}> < Card style = {{backgroundColor: 'red' , width: width, height: height}} stackingFactor = { 1 } { ... this.state} { ... this._animations} > < Card style = {{backgroundColor: 'black' , position: 'absolute' , top: 30 , left: 90 , width: 100 , height: 100 }} stackingFactor = { 1.4 } { ... this.state} { ... this._animations} > < Card style = {{backgroundColor: 'yellow' , position: 'absolute' , top: 20 , left: 20 , width: 63 , height: 63 }} stackingFactor = { 1.8 } { ... this.state} { ... this._animations} /> </ Card > </ Card > </ View > </ View > ); }

We'll get to the card component in a second. We attach our PanResponder we created to the outer wrap object. Then we nest each card. This is crucial otherwise our layer will 3D transform behind the red layer. So this is forcing the Card to sit in front of the previous card no matter what. I don't know if this is true, but it was happening to me and this is how I fixed it.

We use a prop called stackingFactor . All this does is slightly amplify that cards movements more causing a slight offset and the 3D effect.

var Card = React. createClass ({ componentWillMount : function () { var translateMax = (this.props.maxTranslation * this.props.stackingFactor); var rotateMax = this.props.maxRotation; this._xRotation = this.props.xRotationPercentage. interpolate ({ inputRange: [ - 1 , 1 ], outputRange: [ (rotateMax * - 1 ) + 'deg' , rotateMax + 'deg' ], extrapolate: 'clamp' }); this._yRotation = this.props.yRotationPercentage. interpolate ({ inputRange: [ - 1 , 1 ], outputRange: [ (rotateMax * - 1 ) + 'deg' , rotateMax + 'deg' ], extrapolate: 'clamp' }); this._translateX = this.props.xTranslationPercentage. interpolate ({ inputRange: [ - 1 , 1 ], outputRange: [(translateMax * - 1 ), translateMax], extrapolate: 'clamp' }) this._translateY = this.props.yTranslationPercentage. interpolate ({ inputRange: [ - 1 , 1 ], outputRange: [(translateMax * - 1 ), translateMax], extrapolate: 'clamp' }) }, getTransform : function () { return [ {perspective: this.props.perspective}, {rotateX: this._xRotation}, {rotateY: this._yRotation}, {translateX: this._translateX}, {translateY: this._translateY}, ] }, render : function () { return ( < Animated.View { ... this.props} style = {[this.props.style, {transform: this. getTransform ()}]} > {this.props.children} </ Animated.View > ) } })

That's a lot of interpolate ! Well not really they're mostly all doing the same thing here. Remember when I said our calculations up above could return a percentage between -1 and 1 .

Well all we have to do is specify that as our inputRange and then our outputRange is just whatever our small maxRotation or maxTranslation . Animated will take care of all the multiplication for us! Thanks Animated!

The extrapolate: 'clamp' is EXTREMELY important. Without it the values will go past their maximums. This can be accomplished since locationX and locationY could go beyond the width and height of the container. Long story short, extrapolate: 'clamp' your interpolations!

You can see how the translateMax is affected when our stackingFactor is larger.

var translateMax = (this.props.maxTranslation * this.props.stackingFactor);

Our getTransform just maps the appropriate animated value to it's transform. Also so our Card can be nested we have to specify {this.props.children} .

Look Ma' no setState

That's right. We've used all Animated here. No diffs are happening to cause re-render, so our animations should be quite performant.

Done

This is currently only supported on iOS but appropriate support for Android is being added here https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/3522

As always live code https://rnplay.org/apps/qLNwNw

Full Code