The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update is losing another of its more exciting features. In July, Microsoft said that the Timeline and Pick Up Where I Left Off features would be delayed until a later release. Now it has been confirmed that Story Remix, the new photo and video app, won't include its impressive 3D capabilities either.
Story Remix was unveiled and demonstrated at Microsoft's Build conference in May this year. It takes something rather unassuming—the Windows Photo and video viewer—and makes it exciting. In simple terms, it includes a bunch of tools for making home videos based on your photos and videos. But that's rather selling it short; Microsoft's demonstration, in the video above, was nothing short of jaw-dropping. This is not Windows Movie Maker; Story Remix used machine learning/artificial intelligence techniques to automatically pick exciting video clips, arrange them and cut them in a sensible way, and add music. Given shots of a girls' soccer game, for example, you could tell Story Remix to make a video focused on a particular team member, and it would pick the best clips to show off that person's performance.
That was already impressive, but Microsoft's demo then kicked things up a notch by adding 3D capabilities. Story Remix was shown importing 3D objects from the same 3D object gallery as is used by Paint 3D. These 3D elements were then incorporated into the videos; for example, a 3D fireball was attached to the soccer ball during a particularly impressive free kick. The fireball's path traced the soccer ball's trajectory—its tail of flame and smoke following the curved path the ball took—transforming the shot into an unsaveable scorcher. Story Remix includes surface detection and tracking, so 3D elements can be pinned to elements in the 2D video, ensuring that the 3D objects stay in the right place even as the camera moves around.
The result was nothing short of spectacular, and these 3D abilities were promised for the Fall Creators Update. Unfortunately, that's now not the case. The version of Story Remix that is released with the Fall Creators Update will include the basic video-creation features and will be able to import 3D objects, but the advanced capabilities that so impressed us at Build—integrating 3D objects into the 2D video, with object anchoring and so on—won't be included. This scaled-back Story Remix should still be a solid piece of software, but it will no longer offer the same bridge between 2D and 3D as Microsoft was hoping.
The company does still intend to offer the advanced 3D features, but they'll come at a later date.
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