creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
In 20+ years, the internet has never failed to provide me a continuous giddy stream of unexpected surprises. It makes Alice’s trip look like a cheesy 1980s VHS movie.
This morning I cleaned a lot of duds, dead critters, and dust bunnies from my RSS Reader. I do keep a category I call “Odds and Ends” which I glance at when needing something new. The sources include Neatorama, MentalFloss, and a few more.
For some reason, the title First Person Hyperlapse Videos caught my eye.
You had me at an interesting title.
And down the hole I went.
Apparently some Microsoft Researches have found a way to convert those long shaky videos from things like Go Pro camera, and compute them to smooth path time lapse videos. The best example is on their site (interesting to see MS researchers using YouTube, guess times have changed. Good)
The computation seems hairy, like a frame by frame recalculation of a virtual camera.
But then I found something really wild- Google Street View Hyperlapse does something very similar- it generates a quick timelapse video between two different map points via images from Google Street View. Not quite as smooth as the research ones, but fun to play with.
I did a quick trip up the road from Strawberry, AZ on a scenic route to Flagstaff, well as far as Mormon Lake (a longer trip would have been better). Here is a bit of it captured as a screen recording (QuickTime Player), and some music added in YouTube
While viewing on the Hyperlapse site, you can use the space bar to pause. The real neat thing is as its playing back, you can use the mouse in the frame to switch the point of camera view (I am doing that in maybe the 3rd or 4th pass), even at some points you can see the shadow of the Google camera rig:
It looks like the site uses the Google Maps API and some Javascript, you can get details, and copy of the code at http://labs.teehanlax.com/project/hyperlapse — I am not even sure what outfit this place is, but they exude experimentation.
I cannot tell you that this will change the world or disrupt any industry, but the sheer uniqueness and originality is the kind of flame that draws this moth.
The web is an infinite number of doors. I’m still exploring.
creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by JanneM
