Hike to the Habsburg Castle

On the Swiss National Day, August 1st, I had planned to go on the famous 4-lake trek in the Alps region of Mt. Titlis. Considering the morning's heavy rains and unfavorable forecast for the rest of the day, I had to change plans and randomly picked a hike that was within an hour's travel from Basel. The first option that came up was the scenic hike along the Aare river in the Aargau canton area. 

This is a nice, enjoyable 25 km hike with a well planned trail right by the river-side, letting one enjoy the deep-green waters and the beautiful swans and ducks that lounge about in them. The waters are so clear that one can see the river bed, colored pebbles and a variety of fish life. Along the hiking trail, one encounters a variety of plants and trees - wild black berries, blue berries, red berries and a variety of apples and pears. There are hundreds of acres of corn fields along the way, apart from industrial corridors that have sprung up. From the signposts in the trail, the painstaking efforts by the Swiss government to maintain course of the river and preserve its flora and fauna is evident.

The hike from the Schinzach-bad station to the castle takes a detour from the river, and moves deeper inland through the dense woods up a hill. Coming onto the clearing from the woods, one gets the clear imposing view of the Habsburg castle, or what remains of the original castle built in the 12th Century. This was once the seat of the powerful Habsburg dynasty that ruled over most of Europe, in its heyday. The fortress is now converted into a restaurant, and not much of medieval artefacts are maintained now. However, the story of the castle is illustrated through audio-narratives and pictures at various points in the castle.

Here is the Picture story (please click below) created from the hike, thanks to Google, and with minimal edits and comments added.

Automated Stories from Google

I had recently migrated to an Android smartphone from a Windows 'not-so-smart-version' phone that I had been using for some years. This was a huge upgrade for me and more on this in a separate post, soon. I now want to talk about another feature that I had stumbled upon.

As part of my Moto G2 phone default-settings, I had enabled backup of phone camera pictures onto Google+. I was happy to get this going, since it was a chore to perform backups with my old phone, something that I had to remember to do manually with a transfer to the laptop, once in a while. Over the past couple of months I had hardly taken any pictures on the new phone and this changed with my Backpacking trip, wherein the mobile camera came in pretty handy. I was quite happy with the quality of pictures as well since, with a combination of HDR, focus & exposure settings, many a time, the pictures had turned out better than the other Sony point-and-shoot camera I carried. 

Mid-way during the trip, I got a notification that Google+ had created a picture story. With curiosity when I opened it, I was amazed to see a neat story woven by picking the best from hundreds of pictures, stitching together the location details, sequencing them across different sizes like a scrapbook and finally making it ready to share, with a suitable title. At first look, I was quite impressed with the intelligent way all of this had been put together, with no manual intervention, to create an engaging story, that almost seemed human-created!

Delving further, I understood that this feature was launched by Google in mid-2014 and it worked by simply combining the following techniques:

1. Picking the best, refined set of pictures through algorithms, by avoiding blurred ones, repetitions and the like
2. Using the location tag if its been set, else, use the even 'cooler' algorithm to detect the location by reading the picture landmarks
3. Leveraging Google's auto-awesome feature to improve photos, create animations or video transitions from multiple picture frames, and set pictures with different shapes and orientations
4. Detecting the date & time to sequence the pictures and also build the story
5. Finally, rules to break the story into a logical number of days and picking a relevant tile (for example, my pictures over 5 days was built into 3 stories of varying duration)

It is features such as these that make me want to enable the many Google services that read my location, store my photos, sync my calendar/email and backup files - which otherwise makes me wary due to the company's growing influence & knowledge of my personal life! 

Click this picture story above, that Google created from my Bhutan trip.