Google is absolutely in its element with the camera and software it has for the Pixel and Pixel 2 phones. It started with that awesome HDR+ technology that came with the original Pixel phones, which everybody wanted for their own phones. Now with the Pixel 2, they’re introducing the new “Motion Photos” feature – quite similar to Apple’s Live Photo feature – but just better in a lot of ways due to Google’s proprietary stabilization technology that’s behind the feature.
With the Pixel 2’s Motion Photos, the camera saves a 3-second video recording, showing what happened before and immediately after you pressed the shutter. But what makes them better than Apple’s version? Well, this feature is super stabilized, so it does look like a picture that moves, rather than a clumsily taken video.
The process begins with the aforementioned HDR+ technology, which is already constantly taking photos while your viewfinder is open, so whenever you press the shutter button, you get that 3-second video clip of what happened before and after. But with this information, the phone also stores data from its gyroscope and the optical image stabilization sensors. The software puts it all together, and what you see is pure photographic wizardry.
Once the process is done, the Motion Photos are stored and shareable via Google Photos. In Motion Photos, it is the software that chooses where to short video should be centered, and then find a movement path if there is one in the clip, and then automatically rotates, skews, and stitches together every frame so that it looks like the phone was held steady the whole time. We bet you’d love to test this feature out.
SOURCE: Google
