Google's New Storyboard App Creates Comics Strips from Your Videos

Google announced Tuesday the launch of the first installment of a series of photography “appsperiments.” The company is calling the apps “usable and useful mobile photography experiences built on experimental technology.” Two of the three apps will be available on iOS.

“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,” Google said in a statement.

These appsperiments replicate the Motion Stills approach by building on other technologies in development at Google. They are said to rely on “object recognition, person segmentation, stylization algorithms, efficient image encoding and decoding technologies.”

Basically, they help create some dystopian-looking imagery to share on social media.

First up is Storyboard, only available on Android, which transforms your videos into a comic strip. As Google demonstrates, the app will automatically turn any uploaded video into frames of comic images. Apparently, the app can produce up to 1.6 trillion combinations.

And if you’re not happy with the generated images, you can just pull down to refresh the app to make a new one.

Selfissimo’s quirky name aside, the iOS and Android app is similar to Storyboard in that it allows you to layout several selfies in one shot. Think of it as a photo booth in your phone. With a countdown, the app lets you capture several photos as you change poses and click. At the end of your glamorous shoot, you can either save individual images or the entire roll.

Perhaps the most creative of the bunch, the iOS-only Scrubbies appsperiments is all about chopping and screwing videos. You can “scrub” with one finger to plays a video and scrub using two fingers for a playback you can save. The app “lets you easily manipulate the speed and direction of video playback to produce delightful video loops that highlight actions, capture funny faces, and replay moments.”

Google is encouraging users to test our the apps and give feedback to help create wit updates. The company also promises more appsperiments in the future, based on its findings.