The Camera That Records Your Entire Life

A huge part of photography is being able to select moments in time and capture them. Not just the visual aspects, but the true essence of a moment. But, it's no secret that the rise of digital photography has brought on a wave of "shoot first, decide later" shooters, the pinnacle of which seems to be this little, square camera from the UK. Originally designed to help Alzheimer's patients, the ViconRevue is worn around your neck and takes pictures at standard intervals ranging from 30 seconds and up. It also has sensors that tell the camera when a person is in front of it or it has entered new surroundings, so it can capture potentially important events. Up to 30,000 of the images are stored on 1 GB of internal memory. Having seen those numbers, you can certainly guess at the quality of the images. Samples at NewScientist.com suggest that they're lo-res, soft-focus affairs with tons of barrel distortion and chromatic aberration for miles. But, we're still very early in the life cycle.

When it hits the market, it will cost around $800 (after conversion from British pounds to American dollars) and be geared toward researchers, but it certainly doesn't seem crazy that "Lifelogging" could become something popular with the general public. Twitter has officially proven that people are very fond of producing and consuming granular bits of information about their own lives, so this seems like a natural evolution. The question we're left to ask, though, is that while this certainly counts as picture taking, does it have anything to do with photography? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. [New Scientist]

--Stan Horaczek

Comments

[Alex]

It is indeed a trend. With memory storage increasing exponentially and becoming cheaper, etc, such a device could very well become ubiquitous. Besides, how many times have we encountered "photographic moments" only to realize that we didn't bring a camera (cell phone cameras not included). A useful tool in any photgrapher's tool box.