Why Wearable Cameras Will Be Profoundly Disruptive in Capturing Our World

Since our caveman days, when we carved pictures of our lives onto rocks, we have been a species extremely interested in documenting ourselves. We have come quite a long way from our days with a chisel, with a large majority of us walking around with cameras in our pockets thanks to the power of the smartphone. But wearable technology is set to take how we capture our lives to a whole new level.

Wearable cameras are not new. GoPro, arguably the most popular mountable camera, launched its first wearable product back in 2004. But this category has seen a tremendous amount of growth thanks to advancements in digital camera technology and the growing adoption of wearable technology by consumers. Action cameras from the likes of GoPro, Panasonic, and Sony are commonly seen mounted on surfers, snowboarders, and other extreme and outdoor sport enthusiasts.

Camera-equipped glasses like those from Pivothead and Recon’s Jet are great alternatives to capture the action for pro and amateur athletes alike. But a new category of smaller life-logging devices that clip onto clothing, such as those from Narrative and iON’s new SnapCam, are aimed at the everyday consumer to document their lives on a passive, persistent basis.

There are many benefits to a camera that you wear versus a smartphone or even a traditional point-and-shoot. The first is the ability to capture photos and videos hands-free. This feature is crucial when trying to ski, surf, bike, or rock climb, which are just some of the active use cases of regular wearable camera users.

Smartphones may also be able to take pictures wherever you are, but to do so, users would need to risk tying up one hand to take the shot, which isn’t always feasible while you are in action. The hands-free nature of wearable cameras is extremely valuable in the industrial enterprise, allowing employees to document their surroundings with lower risk of injury in dangerous and precarious situations.

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Unique to wearable cameras is the ability to film your experience from your own point of view. If you have ever watched a video shot with a GoPro and especially glasses like Google Glass or Pivothead, the experience feels as though you are seeing through the eyes of the wearer. Moving the camera lens to eye level creates an intimate experience that can’t easily be replicated with a smartphone or traditional camera.

This POV can be used for more than just capturing your life to share to family and friends. Live streaming what you are able to see in front of you has come handy in the medical and enterprise space, with devices like Google Glass to assist doctors in collaborating on a surgery they are performing or allowing field workers to show the situation they are surveying to team members at home base.

But perhaps what sets wearable cameras apart from other solutions is their ability to document our lives on a persistent basis without us needing to do anything but wear them. Narrative is a camera that takes a picture every 30 seconds and stores it in the cloud. The ability to go back and see your life documented at this level of detail is not only entertaining but can help derive insights into your life, such as where you have been, what you’ve been up to, who you have seen, and your behavior.

This is the premise of Memora, a Singularity University startup that intends to combine the continuous point-of-view capturing of a wearable camera with the advanced image recognition and deep learning AI to derive insights from social interactions to dietary intake. Memora takes the work out of creating a journal and allows users to be more aware of what they are doing without the effort, which can be useful to make life-altering changes.

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Tom Emrich writes about emerging technology including wearable tech, 3D printing, and the Internet of Things for many technology, lifestyle, and news publications. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief for Designers of Things, Senior Editor at BetaKit, and the wearables writer for MobileSyrup. Tom’s writing covers launch announcements, funding news, hands-on device reviews, industry analysis, and editorial.