Still leery of how much information people share on social networks? You won't like this next step: a small, wearable camera that takes photos every 30 seconds, 24 hours a day. The designers of the device, a team of six Swedish entrepreneurs, are calling it a " lifelogging camera."
The camera is still in its prototype stage, and its designers launched a campaign at Kickstarter, a popular fundraising website, to finish developing it and a system for storing the images. Just today (Oct. 23) the designers, who have a startup called Memoto, raised nearly three times their original goal of $50,000.
When ready to ship, the camera will clip onto a wearer's clothes and take 5-megapixel photos tagged with GPS locations, according to the camera's Kickstarter page. The battery will last about two days. When the battery runs out, users are supposed to charge the device by plugging it into a computer.
Connecting the camera to a computer also uploads the photos onto a cloud-based storage service that the designers are working on. The designers expect the camera to gather 4 gigabytes' worth of photos a day and up to 1.5 gigabytes of data a year.
The service, called the Memoto app, will analyze the lighting, time and place of each photo to automatically organize a day's worth of snapshots into a few dozen stop-motion videos.
So far, the camera prototype takes GPS-tagged photos. Its creators are still working on the device's photo-transferring ability and energy use, the Kickstarter page says.
The Memoto team expects to ship the first devices in February 2013. Following new rules at Kickstarter, the team identified some of the major challenges they'll face before that first shipment. They'll have to create a watertight case, they wrote. They'll need to make sure the camera works when worn all day, and they'll have to build electronics small enough for their clip-on design.
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