New camera will document your whole life while it leads to endless mocking
Ever felt like documenting your entire life, but can’t be bothered to constantly pull out a camera to do it? Well, there’s a solution for that now.
UK-based company Vicon, specialists in motion capture technology, have announced a new camera named the ViconRevue which will aid in documenting your life as you live it.
According to NewScientist, the ViconRevue was developed as a way to help patients with Alzheimer’s to review their day and hopefully spur memory retention. The device is a camera that is smaller than the average human palm that you can wear around your neck. You can set it to take a picture every 30 seconds at its fastest setting, but you can also set it to detect changes in environment or fire when it detects body heat in front of it.
The device comes with 1 gigabyte of memory which is good for up to 30,000 images, or about 10 days when it is shooting an image every 30 seconds. All of the images are shot at 640×480 through a fisheye lens, so we aren’t talking high-end pictures here, but enough to at least share some very random moments.
The device is first being marketed to researchers for £500 ($820 USD), and a consumer version will follow in 2010. The price seems extremely high for its capabilities and imaging resolution, but for all of the different ways for it to know when to take an image, it includes light-intensity and light-color sensors, a body heat detector that uses passive infrared, a temperature sensor and a multiple-axis accelerometer.
While this seems like a great idea for scientists and Alzheimer’s patients, until the price comes down it just seems extremely frivolous for consumers. However, we’re sure that won’t stop at least a couple of bloggers from putting this around their neck and taking an endless stream of pictures that will soon show up on their Flickr accounts.
Related Posts:
December 5th, 2009
I like the idea, but $800?
I’d prefer something cheap (obviously), and more discrete. Maybe a lapel pin/broach camera that’s smaller so it’s not so obvious? With that, I might use it on occasion.