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Comment by oflannabhra | Hacker News Reader

With kids, I have often wished to be able to capture a short moment, after it occurred. I hate having my phone out and recording my 2 year old daughter, because it changes her behavior (and I think trains her to be a bit narcissistic).

I'd gladly pay more than $150 for that ability, but I just don't think Spectacles are it.

Someone, sometime, will crack that nut, though, and I'll gladly throw them my money. Google seems to be trying to do it with Clips [0].

[0] - https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17055618/google-clips-sma...

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Interestingly, I think Microsoft has a solution in this category... on the Xbox. "Xbox Record That" goes back in time and records the last 30 seconds of gameplay.

This is how Google Clips should have worked. You can't trust AI algorithms to know exactly when something should be recorded. But, if they're constantly recording and throwing away video, then imagine yelling "Ok Google, record that" to your Google Home, it could instruct all the Clips you have in your house to save the last 2 minutes, then give you an interface to select and edit the videos you want.

How Google didn't think of this integration is beyond me. Sometimes they live twenty years in the future. Sometimes they miss things that are so blatantly obvious that Microsoft has a solution already.

But I also question the motive. This idea that we need to record everything for the future is very recent, definitely motivated by human psychology to collect things and escape the clutches of time. We've lived for thousands of years without it. Why do we need it now? Nostalgia? We already know that Facebook and Insta are bad for your brain by showing you the "surface perfect" lives that all your friends seem to live.

What, then, is the psychological impact of living in the "beautiful past" instead of the moment. You're trading time and money today to collect these. When we recall memories, especially positive ones, our brains add imperceptible flair to them, helping us cherish them even more. This is lost when we take and watch videos of everything, recording the absolute truth of moments in our past. We post them to Facebook. We embarrass our children later in life with them. Its... weird.

As a twitch user that sounds so obvious to me.

Nvidia offers this, but both Xbox and Nvidia's feature only apply to gameplay footage on your computer.

Minor correction: not just gameplay on computer, you can continuously record your desktop too (for whatever reason)

Could be a pretty major battery drain to be constantly writing video on such a small portable device.

A friend brought Snapchat Spectacles (V1) for the exact purpose, and said it was fantastic (the one issue being the light when recording - distracts baby! - that it sounds like V2 solves).

The main issue he had, though, was that Spectacles forces you to use Snapchat. And grandma and grandpa aren't about to install Snapchat just for this. They need to make it much easier to export directly from the glasses to the camera roll, but Snapchat has no vested interest in doing that. So I hope to see a different company come along with a similar project one day.

I just checked and the export to camera roll option is still there. Did you try that to share with grandma/pa?

Yes but the circular videos get all messed up.

Cool, we lose privacy light because baby gets distracted by it and dad doesn't own tape?!

I’ve already cracked this with Nest cameras around our house. When something cute happens I tell my Google Home to take a note with the time so I can go take a clip later. Very poor showing from Google that this isn’t already integrated — would love to say “Hey google save a clip of the last 3 minutes from the bedroom camera”

The needed feature for me is POV. Eye contact, etc, are a big part of memories.

I know there is probably a dystopian future that could come from such a product, but, well, my daughter will only be 2 once.

Try it. Mounted at floor level the Nest footage does a pretty good job of capturing the moment.

If you haven't seen this episode of Black Mirror yet, highly encourage you do: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/.

You kids ever hear of Strange Days? Loved that movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/

I can’t say I love the idea of turning my home into a surveillance state.

Then don't. No-one is forcing you to install Nest.

I didn't either, but I didn't have a better plan at the time and I didn't want to lose the moments.

I'm working on a non-cloud replacement with Raspberry Pis, where all of them are continuously recording and saving to local storage. That's the easy part, haven't figured out clip extraction and when I do I'll replace the Nests.

> I'm working on a non-cloud replacement with Raspberry Pis, where all of them are continuously recording and saving to local storage. That's the easy part, haven't figured out clip extraction and when I do I'll replace the Nests.

Have you heard of ZoneMinder?

https://zoneminder.com/

I have not been able to get good frame rates from Zoneminder connected to MJPEG streaming on Raspberry Pi. I figure I'd need to record the video locally on the Pi but that's about as far as I've gotten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You

Just sayin... :)

Have you checked out Google Clips? I've heard good things about it, though I haven't tried it out myself: https://store.google.com/us/product/google_clips?hl=en-US

Yeah, most reviews I’ve seen are underwhelming, including the one I linked.

What the hell is that clip of the guy slapping the ball out of the kid's hands all about?!

If I had to guess I'd say, young dad plays with toddler while mom watches.

Reminds me of this TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word

"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." "

I don't like the design of spectacles. Also, you can't get the videos of your daughter unless you push them to Snapchat (in case you didn't read the TC article)

A reasonably designed, classy glass with the camera not too obvious will do it for me. Will pay $300-400. Already paying that for simple designer glasses.

I think it's already been done for years, just not by one of the big websites.

You can search on Amazon in Electronics : Security & Surveillance for spy glasses to see a listing that may be what you want.

Why are spectacles not it?

1) I'd prefer if I could capture a window that includes the previous x seconds, plus what follows. Live Photos on iOS do a great job of this. Spectacles begin recording immediately from button press.

2) I'd like to directly access the captured moments from my camera roll. I don't use SnapChat.

3) I'd like a more innocuous design than Spectacles. I don't mind a "recording indicator", but the style doesn't really fit a 30 year old dad.

I realize I am not a fit for Spectacles target market. However, I think the market for what I want is a) quite large, b) much more willing to spend.

Well they are tinted 'sunglasses' so not really suitable for wearing constantly indoors. So they need to be near to hand to put-on, at which point a phone is probably just as near .

this might be of interest to you https://benjaminbutton.co/en/

I'm curious -- why do you want to record the moment?

Maybe he is too busy with work related thinking to enjoy the actual moment and want to save it, so it can be enjoyed properly at a later time.

To preserve it.

That is like asking why anyone wants to record anything. Why make home movies? Why take a picture? Why write down a thought?

Yah but the entire point of Snapchat was to discard those moments...

Was. Not anymore.

You cannot preserve a moment nor a feeling. If you value your memories based on a audiovisual capture of events you are missing out on actual feelings of remembrance.

Huh? That doesn't even make sense.

Some people are more forgetful. Regretfully, I fall into that category. If I haven't written about a thing or captured its audio or video in some way, there's little chance I'll remember it after a year.

Those memories have no intrinsic value, but they are very precious. Being able to revisit them A/V is invaluable.

True! I think A/V can also help remember or trigger the memory feelings.

why do you think this?

Aren't you just begging the question here? Personally I don't see why people take pictures of a lot of things. As for preservation -- if you remember it, is it not preserved? And if you somehow forget, could you not forget that you recorded it?

if you don't see the point of people taking pictures and videos of a lot of things in general, then why post it in a thread discussing a device in a product category made specifically for that? It's like saying that you don't see a point of music in a thread with people discussing a new Yamaha piano, and then you attribute that as a disadvantage of that piano.

That's a ridiculous question. $10k says you don't have kids.

I have 3. 15, 14, and 7. I'd give anything to have more of their precious moments saved so that I could reminisce and stroll through those periods once more.

Why does it matter if I have kids or not? Everyone has friends and family. The question remains.

Friends and family is 100x different. It’s impossible to explain unless you are a parent.

Could you not give it a try? Others often try to understand the experience of others. It is the basis of empathy.

When a man and a woman love each other very much, they exchange legally binding jewelry and then rub their bodies together until a baby comes out.

Gay folks can do it too but the process is more complex.

Kino from Stargate?

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