Google’s Motion Stills app takes GIFs to another level

After launching the Gboard keyboard app for rival Apple’s iOS, Google has now launched another app called Motion Stills. Coming from Google Research, the app works in tandem with iOS’ Live Photos feature and uses video stabilization technology to freeze the background in still images to create cinematic pans.

As a result, iOS users get a looping GIF image with the subject and other surrounding objects moving, whereas the background stays still. The search giant adds that the app does not require an internet connection.

Google says its algorithm uses ‘linear programming’ to guess a virtual camera path, removing the shakiness and using a still background or cinematic pan instead.

“Our challenge was to take technology designed to run distributed in a data center and shrink it down to run even faster on your mobile phone. We achieved a 40x speedup by using techniques such as temporal subsampling, decoupling of motion parameters and using Google Research’s custom linear solver, GLOP. We obtain further speedup and conserve storage by computing low-resolution warp textures to perform real-time GPU rendering, just like in a videogame,” said the firm. The algorithm also identifies optimal start and end points of a scene to optimise the looping.

Although the app is only available for iOS users, Google says it might integrate its features into its existing products as well, such as Google Photos.