Pixiq

OK, I’ve seen the future and it’s on someone’s ear. A 1 ounce (that ONE ounce) camcorder that fits on your ear, is Bluetooth enable, connects to your Android phone via a free app or to a PC via USB, and sells for $199.  I’m sure the iPhone app will follow soon. You can use your phone as a viewfinder, remote control and editing tool for creating clips up to 30 minutes in length.

It’s called a Looxcie (www.looxcie.com ) and records video and sound continually up to four hours. When you see something you like and want to either save it or send it to your social media, you hit a button and it saves the previous 30 seconds as a clip. Clips are time stamped and stored in a clip register as MP4 files. If you continually press the save button, it will send that clip to a predetirmined email account. That means you can see it and share it immediatley. 

No fuss, no muss, no big camera to carry. In fact nothing to carry, it’s just attached to your ear! It’s not high definition; at the moment it’s 480 x 320 at 15 frames per second (FPS). Sure, that might seem small for now, but seeing how technology has moved in my lifetime, I expect to see an HD version of the Looxcie before long. 

Actually, there are slightly bigger, and I mean slightly, HD mini camcorders right now, like the GoPro HD cameras (www.goprocamera.com) starting at under $300 with a version coming out soon priced at $179.99. They can record 1,280 x 960 at 30fps.

Make no mistake, these little cameras are game changers. It will change how people view the world and changes what we want to see. Scary, yeah in an “Orwellian 1984” kind of way, but at the same time exciting in a “what can we do and see next”, kind of way. Artists always seem to take technology like this is expand our visual boundaries.

I’m in the middle of writing a story here at Pixiq at the end of the week about my foray into video and I’m thinking if I wait a few days, it may already be outdated at the rate things are changing. The description of “Photographer” is changing fast these days and I think cameras like these and other technology changes will accelerate that change. I hate the term paradigm shift as it’s been so overworked, but I do think its the best way to describe what we will see again in the next few years in photography. This ain’t your daddy’s photography anymore.