Many people found out that videos shared on Instagram are less interesting. Acknowledging its users' expectation, Instagram is lifting the curtains to unveil Hyperlapse, the second app outside of Instagram after its photo messaging app Bolt.
Before, when users capture a video to share, they just put filters on them and cast them out to the wilderness of social media. With Hyperlapse, Instagram is giving a new way to make those shareable videos to be more beautiful and interesting.
Hyperlapse is essentially an app to create moving time lapse videos. Time lapse photography is a technique in which frames are played back at a much faster rate than that at which they're captured. This allows viewers to experience a sunset in 15 seconds, for example. The moment can be mesmerizing to watch because they reveal patterns and motions that are otherwise invisible.
Capturing hyperlapses has traditionally been a laborious process: consists of a variety of camera mounts and professional video editing software. With Hyperlapse, the goal was to simplify this process.
Just like the native Instagram app, Hyperlapse is easy to use and less intrusive. While users are given the easy to use interface presented by a single record button and a post-capture screen, the app does the rest of the heavy works behind the scene. All the user needs to do is record something and choose how fast the playback will be. Between 1x to 12x, Hyperlapse can create a smooth time-lapse video that don't require sophisticated app/software to make.
To achieve fluid camera motion, Instagram incorporated a video stabilization algorithm called Cinema which is already used in Video on Instagram.
Inspired By The Limits Of Technology
The inspiration came to Instagram's team when Thomas Dimson was working on Instagram’s data, trying to understand how people connect and spread content using the service. Just like many other people working in the company, Dimson is indeed a photo and movie lover. One of the movie that affected him was a 1992 Baraka. The movie that's about a footage of people, places and things from around the world, lacks narration or plot. But the film has been in Dimson's mind ever since he watched it in his basement, and that was his first initiative to create Hyperlapse.
In 2013, Dimson was recruited by Instagram. He made contact with Alex Karpenko, a friend of his from Stanford who had sold his startup to Instagram in 2013, and those responsible for the first ever image-stabilization technology for smartphone videos. The technology was essential for Instagram. Apple's iPhone 4 released in 2010 was one of the first smartphones able to capture HD video, but cramming all that into a mobile device was proven to be difficult.
The idea to create a new algorithms began. With image stabilization as the primary target, they're trying to create something that technologies at the time couldn't answer. Smartphones' camera used image stabilization to analyze frame by frame to identify image fragments. They reverse engineer the motion data to create a steadier version. That wasn't a difficult task, but the thing is that this was fine for a movie studio with massive computers. What they want is the similar thing on a handheld device.
Inspired by a demo in which was showing gyroscopes attached to cameras to de-blur their images, Karpenko realized that smartphones indeed didn't have the power to replicate video-editing software, but they did have built-in gyroscopes, and that is the thing they need. On a smartphone, instead of using power-hungry algorithms to model the camera’s movement, he could make the algorithms to measure it directly, then it will map one frame to the next to give "illusion" that the camera was being steady.
In his post, Karpenko explained it using the diagram below that shows the pipeline of the Cinema stabilization algorithm.
"We feed gyroscope samples and frames into the stabilizer and obtain a new set of camera orientations as output. These camera orientations correspond to a smooth 'synthetic' camera motion with all the unwanted kinks and bumps removed."
"These orientations are then fed into our video filtering pipeline shown below. Each input frame is then changed by the IGStabilizationFilter according to the desired synthetic camera orientation."
When Karpenko created a demo on his own, he filmed a bot on a wall while making has hands shake. "The images in the test matched up almost exactly, and that's when I knew this was doable," said Karpenko.
Dimson was the one who persuaded Karpenko into creating a prototype app that wouldn't just improve the shakiness in typical handheld videos, but also good enough when the user is running. Usually, this was only possible by using powerful computers and software. But when seeing the first demo of the prototype, Dimson believed that there is a possibility.
When they finally succeeded, "we were blown away by how well it worked," he said.
When Dimson and Karpenko uploaded a video captured using the app to Instagram, Instagram fell for amazement.
"This is cool," declared co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom in a comment. With Systrom's approval, they engaged the project to a wider group.
"Honestly, we're really surprised this thing didn't leak out, given how obsessed people were with using it," said Gabe Madway, a spokesman for the company.
A Standalone App
When Instagram has a potentially good product it's about to show, it must consider whether to release it under its main core app, or releasing it under its own dedicated app.
While it can be a great advantage for the Instagram core app to use this feature, Instagram decided to make the feature into a separate app. The reason for this is to deal with reality. When something good is about to be released, it can potentially alter its core business.
If the already fanatic Instagram users became obsessed with the new feature, they can put Instagram's main feature aside, putting Instagram's brand away into a secondary item that complement this new one. On the other hand, if Instagram hides the feature, most people will ignore it. Instagram is already a simple app the way it is, the company didn't want to bloat it with something that may jeopardize its brand.
For that reason, the company split it off into its own product. The result is Hyperlapse, an app that uses clever algorithm processing to make a mobile device able to in creating tracking shots and fast, time-lapse videos that look as if they're shot by sophisticated devices and software.
Initially possible only for iPhone users, Instagram hopes to develop an Android version after changing Android's camera and gyroscope API.
"We didn't want to create a special use that would just be hidden," said Mike Krieger, Instagram's co-founder and CTO.