An app developed by Cornell researchers uses augmented reality to help users repeatedly capture images from the same location with a phone or tablet to make time-lapse videos—without leaving a camera on site.
An app developed by Cornell researchers uses augmented reality to help users repeatedly capture images from the same location with a phone or tablet to make time-lapse videos—without leaving a camera on site.
Time-lapse photography, which involves combining photos taken over long periods of time, provides a powerful way to visualize phenomena such as changing seasons or the movement of the sun. Traditionally, photographers would leave a camera on a tripod for the duration of the event, but researchers working with Abe Davis, assistant professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, have developed a more convenient method. Their iOS app, ReCapture, is now freely available in the Apple app store.
The researchers believe this is the first application designed for creating time-lapse videos from handheld devices.
Ruyu Yan, a computer science major in Cornell Engineering who was the lead developer of the app, presented the work, “ReCapture: AR-Guided Time-lapse Photography,” at the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology on Nov. 1.
The app has three capture modes that cover a range of scenarios. One works best for landscapes, one helps capture close-up scenes and a third collects a range of images that can be used to reconstruct the scene in 3D offline.
