The name of the ‘OMG Life Autographer‘ is probably a pretty good sign that I am not the target audience for this device, decribed as ‘The World’s First Intelligent, Wearable Camera”, but it does look in some ways an intriguing device, though the images taken by Rankin on its web site really do less than nothing to make it appeal to me.
It seems to be a device to produce a photographic record of your day without the actual thought or effort of making photographs. It isn’t the first device that can do this, and I seem to recall artists who experimented wearing cameras set to take pictures at regular intervals way back in the days of film. And helmet cameras have really made such things commonplace. But the ‘OLA’ is at least rather less painful than ‘The Third I’ which involved New York University photography professor Wafaa Bilal having a 10Mp camera screwed into a “transdermal implant” on the back of his head and wearing it for a year (you can see some of the results on the web, and they are frankly exactly as interesting as you would expect.)
But Autographer claims to be intelligent, though it isn’t clear exactly what this intelligence entails, it does incorporate six sensors, including a PIR sensor which I think detects movement in front of the camera, as well an accelerometer which determines the wearer’s movement, and temperature, colour and compass sensors. It also keeps track of where you with GPS. But there are no clues on the web site as to how it uses any of this information to decide when to take pictures.
The images Autographer produces are 5Mp semi-fisheye, with a 136 degree angle of view, and are about as good as you would expect – this isn’t a camera for those concerned with image quality. There is an excellent Quick Review on Digital Photography Review which has some sample images from London and gives a fairly detailed look at the device.
The image distortion is interesting, and is different from that of the two semi-fisheye lenses I own, the Nikon 10.5mm and Samyang 8mm. I removed the curvature at the edges by using the Fisheye–Hemi plugin in Photoshop by increasing the canvas width from 2592 pixels to 3592 (giving a rectangle on each side 500px wide in the background colour), then applying the ‘full-frame’ version of the plugin before cropping back to an image rectangle, now around 2472 x 1936 pixels. With some noise reduction, correction of contrast and brightness and light sharpening, the images when reduced to web size – perhaps around 600×450 px, are just about acceptable quality. But I guess for most potential users, bad will be better, and they won’t be satisfied with the output until it’s been further freaked with Instagram.
Although usually it takes pictures without human intervention, you can tell it that you want it to be ‘active’, though apparently it waits for 10 seconds before it starts to take pictures when you’ve pressed the button. And you can stop it taking pictures by covering the lens with the bright yellow rotating lens cap. It is small, weighs around 2 ounces and is said to be stylish, which I think means black with a leather strap. Certainly you would feel less of an oddity wearing it around your neck or clipped to a jacket than wearing a helmet camera in normal situations.
Perhaps the most interesting thing on the web site is a whole page of Autography Etiquette, including advice to get the agreement of friends and family, to follow laws on photography and to respect the privacy of others. Though I suspect the most interesting images will come from people who ignore this!
Given that its 8Gb of memory can store 28,000 pictures, users are likely to have an awful lot of editing to do, and I suspect we will be inundated by masses of largely random images on Facebook, Flickr and other social media and image-sharing sites. It rather reminds me o those millions of monkeys randomly typing to produce the works of Shakespeare. One could see it as those Lomography walls taken to a logical conclusion. Of course just a few of Autographer images will have some interest but I doubt we will ever see them found from the haystack.
