Today at 11am Mountain Time, Instagram is releasing Hyperlapse, a remarkable new app that empowers users to create fantastic tracking shots and time-lapse videos. Yesterday, this would have required $10,000 or more in professional production gear. Now, with the use of a clever algorithm, it's available on smartphones for free.

Introducing Hyperlapse from Instagram from Instagram on Vimeo.

Instead of intensively processing the raw video to artificially model the camera's movement, the app makes use of smartphones' built-in gyroscope to measure the phone's movements directly. As WIRED reports, the concept of Hyperlapse may be too complex for average Instagram users, so the company decided to release it as an entirely separate app rather than a feature on the core Instagram app. “We didn’t want to create a special use that would just be hidden,” says Mike Krieger, Instagram’s co-founder and CTO.