Microsoft Hyperlapse Fixes Your Shaky Footage

GoPro videos are cool in theory but sometimes nauseating in practice. That need not be the case, Microsoft says. The company has a new algorithm that can turn lurching, perhaps boring first-person videos into a smooth, sped-up, polished product. The Hyperlapse version plays at ten times the speed of the original and eliminates many of the effects of camera shake.

Ordinarily, speeding up a shaky video only amplifies the shakes. But running the video through Microsoft's algorithm before speeding it up creates a new camera path, one without the wobbles inherent in shots taken by helmet-mounted cameras.

The program also rebuilds the entire scene, which lets it replace some frames with computer-generated ones. For example, it might inject frames with a slightly different viewpoint from the original to create a smoother sequence. The result is a video that looks like it was filmed from a perfectly still professional apparatus.

Microsoft Research announced Hyperlapse at computer-graphics conference Siggraph and says it hopes to make the technology available as a Windows app.