金融时报:脖子上的自动拍照相机

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2021年10月10日

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脖子上的自动拍照相机

号称是“世界首款智能可穿戴相机”的Autographer是一款可挂在脖子上或者别在衣服上的自动拍照相机。它内置的传感器和 GPS定位系统会根据光影、色彩、运动、方向和温度识别拍照的最佳时期，无论好坏，它的确是一款特别的、无需动手的相机。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

pioneer先锋[paɪə'nɪə(r)]

gadget小玩意['gædʒɪt]

pacemaker领跑者['peɪsmeɪkəz]

doomed难逃一死的[dʊmd]

meltdown彻底垮台['meltdaʊn]

narcissism自恋['nɑ:sɪsɪzəm]

nostalgic怀旧的[nɒ'stældʒɪk]

giggle咯咯的笑['gɪgl]

gimmick噱头['gɪmɪk]

Cameras may yet put wearable technology in the picture（702words）

By Jonathan Margolis

Three years ago, a life-logging camera, Autographer, was announced. It was welcomed as a wearable-technology pioneer and was British — unusually for a novel consumer gadget.

Autographer was worn like a necklace and took thousands of photos a day, prompted by sensors that intelligently detected movement and other stimuli in the hope of getting the occasional nice snap. Its slick launch at London Zoo was greeted with some excitement. Wearable technology, at least for those who don't count glasses and pacemakers as trendy enough to be called that, was with us.

I'm glad/relieved that I reported Autographer as fun but doomed, because the £400 device was abandoned a few weeks ago by the maker. It was not a start-up, but the successful and perfectly grown-up Oxford Metrics Group, for whom it seems to have been a fairly small-scale experiment with a consumer product.

Apart from the fact that Autographer did not pass the common sense test, there were early signs of its ultimate demise. I saw the team at a wearable-tech show five months after launch and asked how it was going. Wonderfully, I was told, and proving particularly popular with magicians. Interesting market, but perhaps a little niche.

Thinking about Autographer's fate, I'm not inclined to go into middle-aged meltdown about narcissism and modern youth's obsession with recording everything rather than living in the moment. It's wiser to take all that lightly; it's not the end of civilisation. But you still would have thought that was it for tiny wearable cameras.

Yet now a Swedish company, Narrative, which launched a smaller version called Clip at about the same time, is having another run at the idea. Clip simply took a photo every 30 seconds, but Clip 2 also captures video on demand, like a GoPro but a fraction of the size.

And looking at Narrative's website, a tiny bit of me is thinking it looks, well, almost desirable. I take a lot of mobile phone videos, not for sharing, but to watch in idle moments for nostalgic purposes. So perhaps carrying a body camera, like some police officers now do, would be interesting? It would at least be handy for resolving domestic disputes: “You say you told me to get cat food at the supermarket. Let's check the recording.”

The first Clip got more traction than our brave, British chaps managed. It was adopted by the very god of life-logging, Morris Villarroel, professor of animal behaviour at Madrid's Polytechnic University. Prof Villarroel has kept a microscopically detailed diary of his daily life since 2010, but has reportedly been using a Narrative camera to add 700,000-plus photos to his voluminous handwritten notes.

Will Narrative bring wearable cameras to the mainstream? Probably not, but its tiny dimensions and less-clunky design than Autographer mean that convincing mainstream consumers is not as inconceivable.

The point is that there is a decent record of outlier innovations that seem bonkers when mooted, before then taking off — usually after another company has a stab at them. Leaving aside inventions such as writing (which Socrates thought disruptive and undesirable) and the telephone (which almost everyone thought was a gimmick), technologies such as texting and phone cameras have surprised even their inventors by how popular they have proved.

I couldn't stop giggling at the launch of the first camera phone I saw in 2001; whatever next? Colleagues reported the development more as quirky Japanese stuff, but essentially unwanted. I envisaged an epidemic of people taking and sending unrequested photos of their genitalia, which kind of happened but has been far from the defining characteristic of the behemoth that is phone photography.

What, then, of the innovation greeted with the least enthusiasm in recent memory — the Google Glass internet spectacles, which within days spawned the expression “Glassholes” to describe their users? Privacy issues, creepiness issues and looking-stupid issues were among the problems.

According to industry chat, it's just possible that Glass will be back in a less ridiculous form. Google supposedly has a team reviving the project under the name Aura. Now, an even smaller Narrative-type camera, embedded unobtrusively in a good-looking, socially acceptable connected spectacle frame, which recorded in high definition everything interesting you saw?

That could work for me. Maybe.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1.Where did Autographer launched in the first place?

A.UK

B.USA

C.Canada

D.China

答案(1)

2.How much is Autographer in UK?

A.£500

B.£200

C.£100