Ivolution: Your personal timelapse

Here comes a new blog post, after almost two months of silence.

I was in holidays for the last two weeks, and decided not to touch the computer for all that time. And I must admit that with the combination of my friends coming from France and the perfect weather here, it was no that difficult. In fact, I even switched my phone off for a week (well ok, I had forgotten my pin code ^^).

But lately, I spent most of my free time working on Ivolution, and this is what I want to present you today !

Basically, it is an application that aims at helping you create videos of yourself over time. Simply take a picture of your face every now and then for some time, and Ivolution will generate a timelapse with it. I use face recognition so that your face overlaps on all pictures.

But as Napoleon once said :

Un petit dessin vaut mieux qu'un long discours

Here is a demonstration of Ivolution capabilities.

I have been working on it for dozens of hours now, and slowly see it taking shape. If I had a functional core for some weeks now, it is far from enough to get a nice product and much is still missing (nice interface, performance, documentation, easy installation, . . . ). And as a computer vision engineer, it takes me a lot of time to implement all those elements !

But some time ago my very first early user, Ignacio Martinez (Kudos to him!) lately informed me about the Ubuntu App Showdown and I decided to give it a shot. I had three weeks to transform my bunch of classes into a proper product . In fact, I lost countless hours trying to package my projects into a proper deb file, and could not make it to the deadline.

Hopefully, all this work is not lost! The perspective of a contest gave me a big motivation push,  and I now have a first beta version for Ubuntu users including a User Interface! Here is what it looks like (yes, I would benefit from more designer skills) :

You can find it here, and you need only one minute to install it (just follow the README, and everything should be fine).As I said, there is still a lot to be done to transform it into a nice application, but I think the project has met his first milestone.

Just getting out of holidays, my batteries are full up and I have a lot of ideas to implement.Here are some of my next objectives for the coming weeks :

• Redesign the GUI so that the application can be used by Windows and Mac users.
• Create proper installers, to ease installation.
• Implement a save/load project capability. For now, users always have to start from scratch. I want to change that
• Increase performance. Face recognition is complex, and the processing can be long depending on the size of the images.

If you like the idea, give it a shot and let me know if you like it ! Feel free to post bugs here, any comment is appreciated.

Starting now, I’ll write a weekly update about the status of the project to keep you informed.Hope some of you will like it ! And if you want to support the project, feel free to Flattr or Gittip me ;)