Super cool gadget for stop motion videos – Apparata

This stop motion video maker gadget makes it very easy to create such videos. We have the images!

Many people are kind of scared of artificial intelligence. But now a gadget has been developed based on AI (artificial intelligence) to perform a good trick. Not that it will save humanity, but it is a nice application.

Gadget stop motion videos

Stop motion videos are very popular on YouTube. In particular, very elaborate stories with Lego figures in a Lego world. Awesome. The problem with this is that making a video takes an agonizingly long time. In addition, it is also painstaking work to always set every figure, or every adjustment, correctly. And what if it’s not to your liking? Then it has to be all over again. The horror.

Conclusion: it’s easier to just shoot live action or use computer techniques. In the video below we see a build-up of a movie by a stop-motion animator named Nick Bild. He spends about 2 full minutes wiggling Lego characters.

Solution

But then we see the same movie with the scene without Bild’s hand and only the resulting movements are visible. And voilà, it’s a decent stop-motion video. This technique does not require a room full of expensive GPUs. It is a simple computer vision system with a hand posture estimation algorithm. It only takes a single photo when there is no hand on the screen. When a hand reappears, it waits for it to leave and takes another one.

Check out the entire project here on GitHub.