Say Cheese!

There's something to be said for junior siblings who harbour grandmotherly ambitions — not only are their intentions unfailingly above-board, but they often provide you with eminently sensible advice. My younger sister, forever trying to overtake the years that separated our births (and not merely due to her head-start in child-rearing), gave me one such invaluable tip some moons ago. In sum and substance, her insight was to forsake still photography in favour of video when trying to capture intimate moments with my newborn.

The logic, as most parents will readily recognise, is simply this: perfect as the cherub may be, one can never quite manage to make them pose, camera at the ready in the manner one desires to capture; or be able to whip out the camera in time to catch the pose they already have. Consider, too, how consumed one is by an overarching desire to capture those magical moments for posterity or future viewing pleasure. As such, among general early parenting tutorials, this visual arts lesson is worth its weight in gold. (There is a school of thought that directly posits Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to be an offshoot of this inability of subject and equipment to align!) The handycam, video-enabled digicam, or (increasingly) the mobilephone camera in video mode, therefore, are God’s gift to parentkind. You point, click, and whirr — you're away!

But whoa, you still have to lug the equipment along; test your hand-eye coordination; and of course keep one hand otherwise engaged, and not in petting one’s progeny or restraining them from mischief! Last month, however, going through some internal communication on digital trends and practices, my attention was drawn to a brand new product. Looxcie, as this device is called, is a camera crossed with a Bluetooth handsfree audio earset. Perched on your ear, Looxcie’s camera records all you see, all the time — and if you spot something worth capturing (or sharing online in our post-FB quasi-voyeuristic times) you click a button — to save, edit, or instantly upload the immediate 30-sec clip to your favourite social networking site.

Now you may be justified in calling this premature, but my argument is that the Looxcie represents a new level in the evolutionary relationship between humans and machines. Like many digital products, it fundamentally makes technology seamless by reducing disruption in your daily life and habit during its use. We thus take a step closer to the body itself becoming our computing interface.

There is a catch, of course — and it is surely not the device’s five-hour storage limit. As our real and virtual worlds collide, the Looxcie as an accessory for the self is sure to find many takers. Yet, not all of us may be equally comfortable playing Dante to its Beatrice — lest Divine Tragedies result.