Google Has Released 3 New Photo Apps Built On Experimental Technology

Google has released 3 new photography apps for smartphone users who want to have a little bit of creative fun with their photos and smartphone camera. 

The apps are what the Google Research Team are calling 'photography appsperiments' (do you see what they did there?) and they take advantage of the improvements in smartphone technology as well as research Google has conducted. 

Commenting on how smartphone camera technology has improved over the last few years, the Google Research Team said: "Until recently, cameras (in smartphones) behaved mostly as optical sensors, capturing light and operating on the resulting image's pixels. The next generation of cameras, however, will have the capability to blend hardware and computer vision algorithms that operate as well on an image's semantic content, enabling radically new creative mobile photo and video applications."

The 'appsperimental' approach was inspired, in part, by Motion Stills - an app developed by researchers at Google that converts short videos into cinemagraphs and time lapses. The Motion Stills app uses experimental stabilisation as well as rendering technologies and the new apps further build on this research with the introduction of object recognition, person segmentation, stylisation algorithms and better image encoding and decoding technologies.

The three new apps are 'Storyboard' 'Selfissimo' and 'Scrubbies', all of which are free to download.

Storyboard

Storyboard (for Android only) turns video into single-page comic layouts. Simply shoot a video and load it in Storyboard and the app automatically selects interesting video frames, lays them out, and applies one of six visual styles. Save the comic or pull down to refresh and instantly produce a new one. There are approximately 1.6 trillion different possibilities.

Selfissimo!

Selfissimo! (for iOS and Android) is an automated selfie camera mode that snaps a black and white photo each time you pose. Tap the screen to start and tap it again once you've captured all of the selfies you want to. The app captures a photo whenever you stop moving and you can save a sequence of images as a contact sheet or individual images. 

Scrubbies

Scrubbies (for iOS only) lets you easily manipulate the speed and direction of video playback to produce video loops. Shoot a video in the app and then remix it by scratching it like a DJ. Scrubbing with one finger plays the video and scrubbing with two fingers captures the playback so you can save or share it.

Google wants you to try them out and give them feedback using the in-app feedback links. On occasion, we found the apps froze and closed but generally, they worked well and are quite fun to use.