Hasta La Ideas

A guy carrying a load of dead pigs into a butcher shop; a construction worker trying to goad a cabbie into a fistfight; a camera crew preparing to shoot a scene from Louie. These are all fleeting things I’ve encountered recently on the streets around my apartment, and I would’ve photographed all of them, but I can never pull my phone out and navigate to the camera in time. If it was my job to generate interesting photographic content for my Facebook page, I’d be failing miserably.

Seattle, Washington-based design consultancy Artefact Group has designed a small, wearable, instant-on camera concept called Meme whose appeal should be immediately apparent to the Facebook/Twitter/Instagram generation. The idea is that you wear it like a pendant so it’s always close at hand, and it has two shooting modes. The first mode is standard, you hit the button and capture a single shot. For the second mode you double-tap the button, and the camera begins snapping a shot every “x” seconds or minutes, depending on what you’ve programmed in. (However, since the camera hangs diagonally from its corner-mounted ring, I’m guessing these latter photos come in crooked.)

After shooting, you can wirelessly transfer the images to your phone or pick one to display in the viewfinder and leave it there, so it’s like you’re wearing a high-tech locket shaped like a mini Polaroid picture around your neck. Leaving an image up doesn’t burn the battery; the display uses e-ink technology, so it only draws power when you change the image.

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