RCA graduate Mimi Zou has designed a camera that follows your eye movement to take pictures of exactly what you see – and it can even identify your friends by their unique iris signature. This eye-tracking camera by Royal College of Art graduate Mimi Zou is controlled by blinking and squinting The Iris camera uses biometric technology to identify people by looking at their unique iris signatures. If the user’s iris is recognised, the camera will automatically load their preferred settings – including aperture, ISO and screen display. As the user looks through the lens, they can zoom in and out by narrowing or widening their eyelids. To take the photo, they simply hold their gaze and double blink.
Once the photo is taken, biometric technology also recognises the subject’s iris and offers to tag them. Photographers and their friends have to register their biometric information to access these features, but they can also opt out of being tagged in photos. The camera works for both stills and moving images, and it can upload files instantly through a Wi-Fi connection or store them on an SD card inside until a connection is reached.
Mimi Zou told the media that what she is expected to do it the following months is to polish this concept product and find sponsors to manufacture this camera together. Someone suggests starting a kickstarter campaign (www.kickstarter.com is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.) to obtain funds for commercial manufacturing.
Actually, IRIS camera is not the only new-conception camera. 2012 April 4th, Google announced to start Project Glass program. Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). The intended purpose of Project Glass products would be the hands free displaying of information currently available to most smartphone users and allowing for interaction with the Internet via natural language voice commands, in a manner which has been compared to the iPhone feature Siri. The operating system software used in the glasses will be Google’s Android.
Project Glass is part of the Google X Lab at the company, which has worked on other futuristic technologies, such as a self-driving car. The project was announced on Google+ by Babak Parviz, an electrical engineer who has also worked on putting displays into contact lenses; Steve Lee, a project manager and “geolocation specialist”; and Sebastian Thrun, who developed Udacity as well as worked on the self-driving car project.
