Today, Microsoft announced that its next major update to Windows 10 will be known as the Fall Creators Update. It"s expected to arrive sometime around September, and will feature the company"s new visual style: the Fluent Design System, formerly known as Project NEON.
As part of that announcement, the company also unveiled a new creative app, "to give people a sense of what’s possible with the Fall Creators Update."
It added:
Built on .NET and distributed through the Windows Store as a Universal Windows Application, Story Remix uses the Microsoft Graph to transform your photos and videos. Story Remix automatically brings your memories, or even your friends’ photos and videos together to create stories with a soundtrack, theme, and cinematic transitions.
Building on the company"s Windows Mixed Reality platform, the app also continues the "3D for everyone" vision that it articulated as part of the Windows 10 Creators Update, which is currently rolling out to PCs worldwide.
"You can also create mixed reality by adding 3D objects to your photos and videos to tell stories in a whole new way, or turn your photos and videos into your canvas, drawing on them with Windows Ink," Microsoft explained.
The app can also recognize people and objects in photos and videos, making it as easy as possible to find content to compile and organize into new projects. This includes support for grabbing content from iOS and Android devices.
During a demo on stage at the company"s Build 2017 developer conference today, Microsoft"s Lorraine Bardeen grabbed a video from her iPhone, opened it in Story Remix on Windows 10, and then wrote a note with her Surface Pen on the video. The note then "followed" the person that she selected in the video as she ran through the clip, hovering over her head as she moved into the background.
In an extension of the same demo, Bardeen searched for a "fireball" and "explosion" from an online catalog of pre-existing and user-created animations. It took just a few seconds to "anchor" these animations into the video that she herself had recorded, producing the results that you see below:
Story Remix offers incredibly simple tools to put together clips like this in seconds #Build2017 pic.twitter.com/LNettqOJTs
— Andy Weir (@gcaweir) May 11, 2017
The new app includes support for Groove Music, making it easy to add all sorts of soundtracks to suit the content that you"re working with. It offers numerous social features too, including the ability to share your creations to other platforms, and build on the creations of other users. Bardeen said that "Story Remix is fun", enabling users to reimagine their existing photos and videos in new and exciting ways.