Last August, Microsoft showed off a seemingly magic technology called hyperlapse. The promise of the prototype was to make even the shakiest videos buttery smooth. Within two weeks, Instagram put out a Hyperlapse appof its own for iOS. And while it’s taken Redmond’s finest all of nine months to catch up, its version was worth the wait.
If you’re not familiar with the technique, a hyperlapse video in its most common form takes footage that’s long and bumpy---think of a ski run, or a bike ride, or a clumsy dachshund wearing a GoPro---and both speeds it up and smooths it out. Instead of a boring, jittery mess, you’re left with a tidy time-lapse effect that your friends and family may actually want to watch. All without having to do any strenuous editing of your own.
Microsoft Hyperlapse, available today on Windows Phone and as a beta for a handful of Android devices, might seem functionally similar to Instagram’s version. And it is! But it also has a few key advantages, not the least of which is that it’s the first time Windows Phone and Android users have had access to a reliable hyperlapse app they can call their own. Well, some of them, anyway.
"Getting this to work on Android was hard,” says Matt Uyttendaele, Director of Microsoft Research’s Computational Photography Group. "It wasn’t easy to make this work." The challenge is a familiar one to Android developers of every stripe: fragmentation. Not only are only .7 percent of Android devices running on the most recent release, the wide array of hardware deployed makes a product like Hyperlapse especially difficult to adapt.
“Even within a brand, and within a line, we’re finding variability,” Uyttendaele explains. “One of the more popular manufacturers, within their product line, as you come down in price they start switching out to different GPUs. That causes differences.”
Those differences cause pronounced challenges in developing Hyperlapse, an unusually hardware-intensive app. They’re also, according to Microsoft Hyperlapse Program Manager Josh Weisberg, why you haven’t seen a specific hyperlapse app on Android at all until now, including from Instagram. There are plenty of time-lapse apps, but none that offer the high-tech stabilization that Microsoft’s new offering does. Still, while the current beta only covers 10 Android devices, Microsoft says they’re already looking at user feedback to see where they should bring it next.
That it exists on Android at all would have been a mild shock as recently as a year ago; it wasn’t until recently, under CEO Satya Nadella, that Microsoft began pushing its software aggressively onto other platforms. Broadening Hyperlapse beyond the Windows Phone hinterlands is, fortunately, part of that push.
“This is part of the new Microsoft of thinking more broadly. That’s why we wanted to come out of the gate right away with mobile first, cloud first, and Windows desktop,” says Weisberg.
There are also plenty of practical advantages beyond just newfound availability. Whereas Instagram’s version only processes video shot within the app, Microsoft Hyperlapse lets you upload any video (up to 20 minutes long) and transform it into a sped-up smooth operator. That’s because while the net effect is roughly the same between the rival hyperlapse apps, what’s going on under the hood differs dramatically.
“On the phone, the way that Instagram implemented their hyperlapse is that they require good synchronization between the gyroscope and the phone’s camera,” says Uyttendaele. “They exclusively use the gyro data in order to stabilize the video… you have to record the gyro information at the same time you’re recording the video frames.” Videos shot outside the app don’t allow for that kind of communication.
Microsoft Hyperlapse, by contrast, deploys an algorithmic solution, identifying common points from frame to frame to help create a model of the world. From there, it determines how the camera navigated that world, dropping any individual frames that don’t line up with that path, to result in a clean progression through space.
The mobile version of Hyperlapse is slightly less sophisticated than Microsoft’s desktop counterpart, called Hyperlapse Pro, but the casual user likely won’t notice much of a difference.
As for iPhone owners interested in trying out Microsoft’s hyperlapse… too bad. There are no immediate plans for an iOS version. "There's a real unfulfilled demand on Android, because there wasn't a hyperlapse app available, so we decided we would focus there second after Windows Phone," explains Weisberg. This doesn’t mean there’s no possibility eventually creating an iOS version. "It's something we're always looking at, which is what's the right platform for our customers."
For now, at least, it's welcome news for Android and Windows Phone fans, especially considering that as of a mere nine months ago, Microsoft Hyperlapse was just a research prototype intended strictly for shaky GoPro shots. Perhaps its progress to other devices and platforms will be as swift and steady as the videos it churns out.
