Sometimes you see a hardware product that is just a little bit shocking. Not often, but it happens.
Well, that was my reaction when somebody recently told me about Memoto.
It is a tiny little camera – with no buttons – that you wear on your shirt. It automatically takes photos throughout the day, geo-tags them with the built-in GPS technology, and stores them so that you have an automatic photographic record of your life.
It only takes photos when you’re wearing it. And it takes those photos every 30 seconds. It began as a project on Kickstarter, and now delivery of these tiny cameras is set to begin in April 2013.
Here’s a video which explains more:
What initially shocked me about this was simply… “Why would anybody want to photograph every moment of their day?”
And, initially, I thought it was sharing all of that out to the Internet (which would be freaky).
It looks like that isn’t true. Only YOU can selectively share photos on the Internet and, unless you do that, everything is private.
Which still begs the question…. why?
I can see three reasons:
- Pure vanity. There are indeed some people who enjoy sharing every waking moment of their lives on the Internet. So, I guess something like this would give a lot of fuel to work with.
- Backup for your brain. Most of us tend to think in mental pictures, but we also tend to forget them. If you want to remember something from earlier in the day, perhaps the camera caught it for you.
- Unexpected surprises. Things happen and sometimes you can get some really cool photos at the moment unexpected times. Something like this has a much higher likelihood of capturing those little moments.
It is an interesting little piece of technology, regardless of whether any of us would actually use it or not.
For more information, check out Memoto.
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It’s a bit narcissistic to think that anyone would want to view your entire day in photos. Perhaps if one was doing something like walking on the Moon or scaling Everest then that might be an exception.