Life After Google Labs: 5 Cool Google Experimental Apps

26.09.2011

You may have forgotten that Google owns YouTube, but it does, and the company's engineers offer a collection of 11 experimental YouTube apps to play with. YouTube Music Discovery and Topics are tools to find stuff on YouTube that you didn't know was there and make play lists.

The "Feather" project lets you watch YouTube videos with very low latency, that is delays, resulting in much smoother playback. There's a bit of a tradeoff: Various features, like the ability to post a comments or rating videos, are disabled. Some videos won't be improved by Feather but those that are compatible will show a noticeable difference. Feather is especially useful when your connection is slow or your computer doesn't have much processing power.

Because I don't have two video cams, I couldn't try out 3D video creator, but it looks quite cool. Using cameras sitting parallel to each other, you take two streams of video, upload them and then stitch them together into a 3D video. that tells how to do it.

It's probably more correct to call the offerings from GoogleMap Labs applets. There are seven: Show Me Here! adds an option to the context menu that lets you zoom directly to the maximum zoom level at the point under the cursor. The distance measurement tool gives an "as the crow flies" measurement, that is a straight line, not along a road. Other applets let you see the latitude and longitude of a point on a Google map or automatically zoom to the lowest view that actually has data.