When Charlotte gets her hands on my camera, her most favorite subject is herself. Every time I download pictures from the memory card, there’s at least a couple dozen shots of her own face from about three inches away. Plus, she always manages to look like she has been on a non-stop week-long weed-smoking binge in 90% of the pictures, so I don’t even want to save them for the “cuteness” factor. It’s a good thing we don’t have to use film cameras any more.
So whoever thought up this latest innovation clearly had narcissistic children and stoners in mind: a camera with an LCD viewing screen in the front.
I suppose it’s also useful for those embarrassing Facebook photos and avatars and such. Never again will the social networker be forced to comb their hair backwards to stand in front of a mirror to take their head shot and not look like their reflection. I expect this particular gadget to sell like hotcakes.
And here’s a bit of whizbangery that I can’t wait to get my hands on: an “augmented reality” app for the iPhone that can identify where you are via GPS and then annotate the live video from the built in webcam to provide you with information about your surroundings. (Here’s a direct link to the BBC video from that story, if you prefer).
Acrossair’s “New York Nearest Subway” and “Nearest Tube” (for London) will be available on the iTunes Store as soon as Apple releases the next upgrade of the iPhone OS (v.3.1), but the BBC story also refers to a Dutch company which rolled out an even more-comprehensive app called Layar which runs on phones using Google’s Android OS and can display information about shops, restaurants, ATMs, and even real estate listings. That service is limited to the Netherlands (in fact, I think it’s only for Amsterdam proper), but they anticipate expanding the service to other European cities soon.
Of course, the ultimate setup for a technology like that is to embed the display into a pair of glasses so that you wouldn’t need to look like a complete dork walking around New York holding your smartphone in front of you, but I suppose people have gotten used to looking like dorks walking around talking on their Bluetooth headsets, so what’s the diff? Nevertheless, I think this would be an extremely cool iPhone app.
