[attach id=279678 size="medium"]The Autographer can hang around your neck on a supplied lanyard or be worn clipped to a shirt pocket.[/attach]
The Autographer is the first camera of its kind to be sold to the public. It’s based on a technology developed by Microsoft Research, which resulted in the Microsoft SenseCam prototype. Often referred to as a life-blogging device, such cameras are designed to automatically capture images as you go about your day.
The technology in the Autographer dates back to 2009, so it certainly isn’t anything new. It is basically a wearable, automated camera that hangs around your neck and takes photos, all day, every day. Rather than you actively thinking about an audience and capturing an image for them, it takes photography out of your hands and out of your mind. It lets you get on withactually doing things, rather than recording them.
To start with, the Autographer is not much to look at – a small black plastic casing with an obvious lens. You can hang it around your neck on a supplied lanyard or clip it to a shirt pocket. It’s not waterproof or shockproof, and therefore cannot really be considered as an action cam. However, it’s so light that you will probably forget you have it on.
Such cameras are designed to automatically capture images as you go about your day
The camera has numerous sensors, including a light sensor, temperature sensor, compass, IR-based motion detector and accelerometer. The software in the camera takes these inputs and uses them to decide when to capture an image. In addition you can also set the Autographer to low, medium or high shooting speed, which capture around 50, 100 or 200 images per hour respectively. The Autographer has a custom-made 136-degree angle lens, giving a light fish-eye effect on the resulting images. Focus is fixed and it captures 5-megapixel images
Now that’s a lot of photos whichever way you look at it. At the medium setting you could be producing 1,600 images a day, which is more than I would personally care to go through. Of course you’re unlikely to use it while sitting at your desk, or working in most jobs. However, wear it on an evening out, or to a sports event and keep it on low and you’ll probably get around 200 images to flick through when youget home.
There’s a software companion available, which once installed makes it easy to pull the images from the Autographer. You can then flick through the photos taken, favourite ones you want to keep, share those you like online and delete the rest. The Autographer also features GPS tagging – this is a helpful feature, as you can see where the photos were taken and what the sensorsdetected at the time.
The software also provides a number of ways to use all these images into a more digestible form. You can create GIFs and video by selecting multiple images and choosing a frame rate for the finished file. This way you can compress a whole evening down to a one-minute video. You can then upload the video to the usual sites.
The kind of images you get are very different from those you would frame with a handheld camera. First, you have to consider that a large percentage of the photos are going to be uninteresting – however the remaining percentage will be genuinely natural, unforced moments. It takes images of incidental moments that you might otherwise have forgotten, but which bring a smile to your face nonetheless.
There is, unfortunately, the obvious privacy concern and such a device raises the same issues that Google Glass does.
A technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.