Instagram today announced Hyperlapse, a new standalone app that's been designed to help smartphone users shoot time-lapse videos that look like they were produced with a professional video rig. Prior to the official unveiling, Wired got an exclusive look at Hyperlapse, which is a refreshingly simple departure from the company's primary app. There are no filters here, nor any real editing tools.

You simply record a video and choose what speed you want the finished clip to play back at. Picking 1x will result in a smooth tracking shot that makes use of Instagram's own image stabilization algorithms; the end result is something you'd normally only get using a Steadicam or other, far more expensive equipment. (Microsoft is also making big strides in trying to stabilize handheld and action cam video.) Speeding things up to 12x will result in a more traditional time-lapse video. Once that's done, users can choose to save the video and / or share it with friends on Facebook or Instagram. But you don't need an account with either service to use the app, which is pretty great.



The Verge put together a demo and footage comparison Tuesday morning

Record, choose a playback speed, share

"This is an app that let’s you be in the moment in a different way," Mike Krieger, Instagram co-founder and CTO, told Wired. "We did that by taking a pretty complicated image processing idea, and reducing it to a single slider. That’s super Instagram-y." Rather than try and shoehorn Hyperlapse's functionality into Instagram itself, the company ultimately decided its latest endeavor would fare better as a standalone app. For the full backstory on Hyperlapse's creation — it's largely the work of two Instagram engineers — head over to Wired. The iOS release is expected to launch imminently in the App Store, but an Android version will apparently have to wait for some updates to Google's camera APIs.