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Comment by alanctgardner2 | Hacker News Reader

I know it's late in the game, but is there no switch to turn it off if you're not wearing it, or you're doing something you don't want to record? It looks pretty smooth and button-less to me. That would be a major deal-breaker, in addition to the fact that 98% of my life is terribly boring, and they don't appear to offer any suggestions on how I could only record the interesting parts.

I'd be more interested in a device that buffers the last hour, and lets me store it if something important - accident, surprise party, any random, cool thing - happens. I don't need 50 billion gigs of pictures of my desk, but there are definitely times when I wish I could travel back 20 minutes and remember to take a picture.

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You switch it off by putting it somewhere dark or flat (in your pocket, bag or on a table). If there was an on/off switch and you switched it off before going into a dressing room or similar setting where it's inappropriate to take photos, other people will still be uncomfortable. By making the the on/off switch equal to taking the camera off, we make people more comfortable with the concept of a wearable camera.

A similar line of though went into design of the camera itself. We made sure through user testing that most people recognizes it as being a camera, and not as something else. But also that it is subtle enough to not be distracting. It was a fine balance to find between the two, but with the current design most people find it appealing.

What if I'm laying on the grass looking at the sky?

It takes a few frames for the camera to switch off. Even flat on your back it would be a one in a million chance that your camera ended up being perfectly still with the front axis aligned with the gravity vector for any prolonged period of time. You are breathing and shifting slightly even when relaxed.

A cleaner implementation would simply be monitoring the contact between the clip and the case. A shirt would toggle this to false, in your pocket would be true.

Software can filter your 46.5661287 exabytes of pictures to guide you to the ones that are most interesting. Besides, what's important is relative and could change with future events. For example, a rather casual photo of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky was just a throw away photo when it was taken. But after the scandal broke it became worth a fortune.

http://www.worldsfamousphotos.com/2008/10/15/bill-clinton-hu...

In conclusion, photograph all of the things and worry about analyzing it later.

See, I'm all for big data and part of me loves the idea of analyzing these frames, but I wouldn't want to do it for my life. If you could constantly go back and re-evaluate every moment of the past, I think it would drive you crazy. Hell, my friend spent 4 months organizing 1 month of photos from a holiday. If you had your whole life to work with, forever, you could just get lost in the past and never come back.

Maybe an hour is too short, but I'd definitely want things I hadn't explicitly saved to 'decay' in some way; either a rolling window, or deleting one in n frames based on some measure of interestingness - where n is a function of time. It's not just a matter of hiding the old ones, I think it would be vital to know that deleted images were really gone - to give some urgency to actually looking at them, and to reduce potential time wastage looking at thousands of unique - interesting to a machine - but unmemorable photos.

From the FAQ:

"Is there an on/off button? No. The camera will turn itself off when it is laid flat or put in a dark place, such as a pocket. Otherwise, it will be on."

According to a video on memoto.com it stops taking pictures if it's placed in your pocket. I'm guessing it could be implemented by just throwing away the mostly black images anyway.

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