So you finish your breathtaking bike ride through the forest and speed home to see what kind of job your brand new helmet-attached GoPro camera made of it.
You upload the video to your computer, apply a few edits, and, happy with the results, start showing your cycling adventure to friends.
But as they watch, you notice two things. First, you realize your buddies are starting to turn an unpleasant shade of green. After much consideration, you conclude this must be because of all the camera shake – shake that even your video editor’s advanced stabilization features couldn’t quite fix.
Second, with the video showing no sign of ending, you notice their eyelids starting to grow heavy, with a number of them stifling yawns and looking around the room as if following a fly. This, you reluctantly assume, must be because they find your video stultifyingly boring.
Related: GoPro receives Emmy award for Hero3 POV camera
If this sounds at all familiar, then you may be interested in new technology being developed by a team at Microsoft that could turn such videos into something actually worth watching.
Engineers Johannes Kopf, Michael Cohen and Richard Szeliski have worked together to create a method for building ultra-smooth hyperlapse productions from overly long, shake-filled videos. And the results, it should be noted, are pretty stunning.
According to the team’s website, the software used to create the silky smooth videos employs an alogrithm that first makes sense of the original footage to build a 3D map of the content. The technology can then construct a smoother path frame-by-frame, before rendering, stitching and blending selected frames to create the final hyperlapse video.
Check out the impressive results below.
The good news is that the team is working hard to incorporate the technology into an app, allowing enthusiastic GoPro users to produce a watchable video that actually entertains their friends instead of leaving them desperately hoping for a sudden medical condition that requires immediate hospital treatment.
