Google launches two experimental photo apps – Storyboard & Selfissimo

The search giant Google on Monday introduced two experimental photography apps in Google Play in a bid to offer interesting mobile photography experiences based on experimental technology. The new apps Storyboard and Selfissimo are the first such apps from Google, but the company is promising more such interesting apps (called appsperiments by Google) in the coming months.

“Our “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 using experimental stabilization and rendering technologies. Our appsperiments replicate this approach by building on other technologies in development at Google. They rely on object recognition, person segmentation, stylization algorithms, efficient image encoding and decoding technologies, and perhaps most importantly, fun,” wrote Alex Kauffmann, Interaction Researcher, Google Research, in a blog post.

Coming to the specifics, the Storyboard app, as the name suggests, uses a video as a source and transforms its frames into single-page comic layouts. The application automatically select interesting frames from the video, lays them out and applies one of the six available styles. If you don’t like the frame selection, you can just pull down to refresh and the app will produce a new selection. What’s even more interesting that the app doesn’t use any cloud magic and the whole processing happens on the device. See an example in the GIF below.

The other app, Selfissimo, is targeted to the selfie-obsessed generation of youngsters. It is a simple camera app meant to click black and white selfies. Unlike the normal camera apps, where you pose, set the frame and then tap to click a selfie, the Selissimo asks you to pose and whenever you stop moving it automatically captures the shot. So, once you start a photoshoot, you can continue to strike new poses and the app will keep on capturing without you needing to do anything. Once you are done, you can select the selfies you want or save the whole batch.

Here is how the app functions:

In addition to these two apps, Google has also introduced a video app called Scrubbies, but it is only available on iOS at the moment.

Links: Storyboard | Selfissimo on Google Play

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