a step towards a wearable camera

By anders pearson 03 Sep 2004

Philips has a pretty neat new camera which they are advertising as “wearable”.

i’ve had a strong interest in the field of wearable computing for a long time now so i was naturally interested. unfortunately, their idea of “wearable” is that it goes on your keychain. one of the attributes in wearable computing is that it should be unmonopolizing, ie. it shouldn’t require the user to actively do anything to use it. with most cameras, including this one, you have to pull it out, point it at your subject and click a button to take the picture. all that this camera really has as an advantage at that point is that it’s small enough to always carry with you.

what i’d like to see is a really wearable camera in the wearable computing sense. with a bit of hacking on the hardware, this camera might be a good candidate. if you could modify it so it clips to your shirt pocket and just snaps a photo every 10 seconds or so, that would be pretty useful. you would have an automatic record of your day. you would get 99% boring, random, dark, and out of focus pictures, but every once in a while it might capture something interesting that you never would have shot if you’d had to pull it out of your pocket, aim, and shoot.

the reassuring thing about this camera is that in terms of size and power, we’re really almost there. the camera can be set to take low-res 640x480 photos and has 128MB of memory. that’s about 1000 pictures, which is about 1 picture per minute for 16 hours. so if you synched it up every night, you’d be fine. i’m sure that within a year or two, you could buy a version that had 1GB of space which pretty much gets you to the 10 seconds between shots point. with a bit more intelligence built in, you could probably also have the camera detect that light levels are too low or that nothing is in focus and not bother taking a bunch of the pictures that you would end up throwing away anyway. within 5 years, a device this size for a reasonable price could take decent quality video of your entire day.

probably the limiting factor on the camera is the battery life. it might have space for 1000 pictures, but i doubt the battery could handle staying on for 16 hours. haven’t been able to find any info on its battery life though.

i’m really tempted to buy one of these, glue a clip on the back of it, and rip it open and see if i could add some circuitry to automatically snap pictures once a minute. could be a fun project. need to find out more about the battery life though to know if it would be worth trying.

Tags: gadgets wearable computing cameras