FrontRow is the latest wearable livestreaming camera

The latest wearable camera to hit the market comes from mesh WiFi product maker Ubiquiti Networks. The FrontRow camera is a small device that can be worn on a lanyard around the neck or clipped on and it can snap photographs and livestream video.

Autographer wearable camera launches tomorrow priced at £400, we go hands-off

Wearable camera Autographer launches globally next week, we go handsoff

It's been a long time coming, close to a year, but OMG Life's clippable, er, lanyard-able life-logging camera will be available to buy tomorrow. The Autographer launches in the UK (where the company's based) and most major European countries on July 30th, priced at a rather prohibitive £400 (we're still confirming a US dollar price, but a later launch has been promised) and pitching itself as "the world's first intelligent wearable camera." We'd position it as an addition to your smartphone and/or standalone camera, like Lytro or the incoming Memoto, for those that have the cash.

There's a curious appeal to it, helped by an attractive design that's predominantly plastic. We spent over three days wandering around, sometimes with it on a leather lanyard (included) around our neck, sometimes clipped to our belt or shirt pocket. For better or worse, it's a truly hands-off camera: there's really no way to frame or even time your captures. The Autographer itself chooses when to take a shot using its five sensors (monitoring changes in color, temperature, magnetometer, motion and acceleration), which means there's a hefty dose of luck involved in how your photos turn out. See whether Lady Luck was shining down on us (the sun certainly wasn't) and check out our sample images below and first impressions after the break.

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Source: Autographer

Memoto, The Lifelogger

Some people will hate this device; we love it. It’s a tiny, easy to wear, GPS-equipped 5MP camera that automatically takes a picture every 30 seconds. The picture gets geotagged and uploaded to a server for indefinite and limitless storage when you connect the device to a PC for a battery charge, thus creating a precise log of your life that you can revisit at anytime. Memoto does this as long as it has battery, and its small energy requirements means that this is a period of about two days. There are no buttons: it just takes pictures, tags them with GPS and orientation info (through its built-in accelerometer, so the pictures always come out upright), and uploads. And as long as you’re paying the small recurring fee for the service, you can access the timeline of your life, locate where you were, what you were doing, when, with who… A related application organizes the pictures for you, and groups them into “moments” that you can relive in a stop-motion type of animation. It’s. Just. Awesome.

Of course, there are privacy concerns. To address this, the uploaded pictures are encrypted, and only shared when you choose to do so. There’s also the creep factor. Well, the camera only turns off when you store it away in darkness, so your friends will know that as long as you’re wearing the Memoto, they may be photographed. This takes away the uncertainty that could come with some other similar devices, like Google Glass. If they really hate it, just put it away. As for the legality of it, the company says that as long as you’re not asked to stop taking pictures, it’s ok. We’re not so sure, but obviously there’s a context for everything. Don’t bring these to, say, a gentleman’s club.

It’s a Kickstarter project at the moment, and boy was it funded fast! Within 5 hours Memoto reached it’s goal. It’s now sitting at $243,000 after only asking for $50k. Clearly there’s a huge demand for this. There are still some places left on the second batch of devices at $249, though if you don’t get in on that, you’ll have to pay the full $279 expected retail price and wait until April. The 2nd batch has an expected delivery in March.

[ Product Page ] AND [ Kickstarter Project ] VIA [ TechCrunch ]