Hyperlapse: Crazy high-speed timelapse videos made using Google Streetview

Today, Teehan+Lax Labs unveiled a pretty amazing experiment that takes all of those flat Street View images from Google Maps and creates a hyperlapse videos out of it.

What exactly is hyperlapse? It’s a technique that combines time-lapse photography with sweeping camera movements focused on a point of interest. It’s not an easy task to do either — the design firm says that it took them many hours of stitching together photos to create the videos. Interestingly enough, Google Street View images became its source material for this time lapse project and eventually resulted in the creation of what it calls a usable interface around its engine.

To create your own hyperlapse video, simply select the town or city you wish to explore. From there, choose the start and end point like you were looking for driving directions, and hit the “Create” button. It might take a while for the video to be generated, but

Exploring neighborhoods with hyperlapse video is most definitely going to be a popular productivity drain. But can you imagine how much more enhanced the experience will be if you’re looking at places such as the Grand Canyon, Mount Kilimanjaro or Mount Everest, or even Lucas Oil Stadium.

The idea for the project apparently came from one of the Labs’ motion designers who wanted to create a tool that would help him generate a hyperlapse video using data and emerging technology. For developers and designers interested in recreating the effects, Teehan+Lax has also posted the source code to GitHub.

Photo credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images