Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Photography
  3. News

Try three new photo apps as part of Google’s ‘appsperiments’ project

By

google appsperiments photo apps horse selfie
Antoniodiaz/Shutterstock
“Appsperiments” is a name that hardly rolls off the tongue, but put that to one side for a moment and instead immerse yourself in the smartphone fun offered by Google’s latest research project.

Designed to explore the potential of mobile photography using its latest technology, Appsperiments launches with a collection of three apps described as “usable and useful mobile photography experiences built on experimental technology.”

So what exactly has the team come up with?

Recommended Videos

First up is Storyboard, an entertaining offering (currently Android only) that seems like a cool way to encapsulate a scene or short event. This free app uses artificial intelligence to analyze a video and select “interesting” frames to create a single-page, comic-style layout by applying one of six different visual styles. Pull down on the page to cycle through the different styles. When you find your favorite, tap the display to save it to your device and then share away.

Next, we have Selfissimo for Android and iOS. As its name cleverly suggests, this one is geared toward selfie addicts, and eliminates that awkwardness you experience when trying to reach for the shutter button with your arm extended. Described by Kauffman as “an automated selfie photographer,” Selfissimo takes a black-and-white shot whenever you stop moving. So you can pose and shoot, pose and shoot, and so on till you’re well and truly selfied out. Then all you need to do is review the resulting contact sheet and select the images you’d like to save.

Last up is Scrubbies (iOS only), which lets you scratch your video like a DJ. In other words, Scrubbies lets you manipulate the speed and direction of video playback to create visual loops of selected moments. “Scrubbing with one finger plays the video. Scrubbing with two fingers captures the playback so you can save or share it,” Google interaction researcher Alex Kauffmann explained in a post.

Offering some thinking behind the appsperiments initiative, Kauffmann said that while current smartphone cameras are relatively straightforward in their processing methods, “the next generation of cameras … will have the capability to blend hardware and computer vision algorithms that operate as well on an image’s semantic content, enabling radically new creative mobile photo and video applications.”

The researcher added that Google’s three new test apps “rely on object recognition, person segmentation, stylization algorithms, efficient image encoding and decoding technologies, and perhaps most importantly, fun!”

If you care to take any of the appsperimental apps for a spin, Google would love it if you offered feedback via the in-app links, which could go toward influencing the kind of technology the research team develop next.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
A new Google Pixel Tablet is coming, but it’s not what you think
Google Pixel Tablet on its charging dock.

It's been almost a year since the Google Pixel Tablet went up for preorder, leading many Android tablet fans to wonder when the inevitable Pixel Tablet 2 will arrive. A new rumor suggests that Google could release a new Pixel Tablet as early as next month, but it's probably not what you were expecting or hoping for.

According to @MysteryLupin on X (formerly Twitter), Google is planning to "relaunch" the Pixel Tablet without the charging/speaker dock included in the box. As you'll likely recall, the speaker dock is the Pixel Tablet's standout feature. You can use the Pixel Tablet on its own as a traditional Android tablet when you want, and when you're done, you throw it on the dock to transform it into a smart display. The idea of Google selling the Pixel Tablet without its claim to fame is an interesting one.

Read more
Google just released the first Android 15 beta. Here’s what’s new
The Android 15 logo on a smartphone.

Google has just released the first public beta build of Android 15, marking an end to the developer-focused test phase. The beta version’s release also means that Android 15 is finally in a state where it can be tried by the masses without people having to worry about too many bugs leaving their phone in a sorry state.

The first beta version of Android 15 doesn’t introduce a ton of new features, as most of the notable additions have already appeared in the Developer Preview builds. Google’s blog post, however, mentions the following features as the key highlights

Read more
A new Google Pixel 8a leak just revealed three huge upgrades
The Google Pixel 7a in a person's hand.

We're likely just a couple of months away from Google's next big smartphone release — the Google Pixel 8a. Thanks to a new report revealing a few of the Pixel 8a's possible specifications, it looks like Google's next budget phone should give us some big hardware upgrades.

We'll start with the chipset. According to the report from Android Authority, the Pixel 8a will be powered by Google's Tensor G3 chip. This has been the assumed chip of choice for the Pixel 8a, but it's still reassuring to have it reiterated in this report. Although not the best mobile platform out there, the Tensor G3 proved to be a significant upgrade over the Tensor G2 (the chip inside the Google Pixel 7a) when it debuted in the Google Pixel 8 and Google Pixel 8 Pro last October.

Read more