Vacationing with my family last week, I found myself wishing I was wearing a camera that could capture images as I walked around, then let me smoothly fly through the results (e.g. as Microsoft’s Photosynth does):
Now the startup Narrative (née Memoto) is releasing a second version of their tiny clip-on cam:
Would I pay $200 for it? Hmm—I don’t think I would yet, at least without an ultra-slick way to create fly-throughs.
Still, this all strikes me as a when, not an if. Expect people to keep dismissing it as they did Twitter (“It’s for navel-gazers who just want to tell me what they had for breakfast”) and calling it creepy (“I don’t want a camera staring at me while I’m talking to you in a meeting”), until somebody (GoPro?) devises a killer travel application. And good Lord, might we someday see people actually experiencing their experiences with their eyeballs instead of through a little screen, knowing that recording duties are being taken care of? Nah—that’s probably crazy talk.
This is going to be extremely controversial in germany. We had a similar discussion about google glass, back when it was unveiled. The (more or less) consensus was, that people would find it rude to have a camera pointed at them all the time, not knowing if an image was being captured.
These cameras remind me of the dashcams, which are found in many cars. Those are inadmissable in court in germany http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/the-problem-with-dashcam-videos-in-germany-1623794616 (only english source i could find). They cite the right of informational self-determination as one reason.