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Switched On: A Looxcie into lifecasting’s destiny
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, the mainstay about consumer technology.
Remember those early wireless headsets, a ones that done people look like they had been assimilated by The Borg? Few would seek to lapse to those days for a benefit of bridging a handset as well as one’s ears. But what if one could also overpass a handset and one’s eyes? That’s essentially the guarantee of Looxcie, the Bluetoooth headset that integrates a video camera to enable passive video constraint.
Looxcie’s creators note that using a device requires reduction encumbrance than even the Flip camcorder. Still, there’s no removing around it — a Looxcie is no view tool. Accepting a state of a record for what it is, the designers chose to welcome the distance rather than than try to minimize it. The protuberance that houses a bang mike and lens of a product swells toward an finish that includes a red recording light. The extension in the glossy white, perhaps an homage to large telephoto zoom lenses similar to those from Canon.
The Looxcie, yet, cannot zoom (even digitally). It can, though, stagger about 10 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise to recompense for the place of the head, that can make for both a plain stabilizer and fussy focal source. Despite its large distance, the Looxcie is reasonably gentle, nonetheless positioning it so that the camcorder is capturing what you’re seeing while gripping a earpiece in your ear can be wily.
The Looxcie is additionally a Bluetooth audio headset, and functions in tandem with a screen of a smartphone to create the the kind of “DLR” (Digital Life Recorder). The generally well-designed Looxcie software maintains a cache of everything that you’re examination as long as a camcorder is turned upon. And just like many DVRs have an “instant replay” underline, you can save an present clip by dire the button on a underside of the camera. The Looxcie program can e-mail these clips or post them to YouTube or Facebook, and the whole cache can be sent to the PERSONAL COMPUTER for serve modifying.
As Looxcie’s video gets better as well as the form gets not as big, it could turn a viable tool for capturing those fleeting moments that would otherwise be lost.
While the size and prominence of the Looxcie hardware will certainly have it the nonstarter for many, video peculiarity is actually the bigger barrier — constraint tops out at about 10 frames per second. This is no disbelief in partial the reduction of a Bluetooth connection between the headset as well as a phone. Perhaps Looxcie could improve video extravagant by recording the cache as well as clips to the microSD label in the headset, and send clips to a phone after the short check. As it stands now, however, Looxcie embodies the series of paradoxes. It is intended to capture impetuosity, though a tarnish of the distance disincentives make use of. And it allows you to capture that that you routinely couldn’t, though at quality which you normally wouldn’t.
Still, a single can see a couple of uses for Looxcie. These competence embody capturing events where the audio is in all more important than a video — say, a harangue or discussion row. Another is where you design something to occur but you don’t know when, such as a whale-watching cliche where everybody misses a animal cresting (although even here a single would get improved results only ascent something similar to the Kodak PlaySport to the railing). Then there’s capturing adventures in casual sports, in which Looxcie can be an pick to active sports cams like those from Contour that in all need to be mounted upon the helmet or alternative rigging.
Of course, one of Looxcie’s real strengths is the ability to upload clips in nearly real-time, where a low quality of its clips translates into faster uploads. It makes YouTube a truer extension of “you” and sends video to Facebook without delay from your face. Once on a time, cell phones as well as even digital cameras prisoner QVGA stills. As Looxcie’s video gets better as well as the profile gets not as big, it could become the viable apparatus for capturing those fleeting moments that would differently be mislaid.
Ross Rubin is senior manager director of industry research for consumer record during marketplace investigate as well as research firm The NPD Group. Views expressed in Switched On are his own.
