Soloshot: Automatically film outdoor activities without a camera operator | Hacker News Reader

Soloshot: Automatically film outdoor activities without a camera operator

shop.soloshot.com

324 pointsnazwa168 comments

I've had the SoloShot 2 for almost a year now. I use it for surfing, but just got a small racing dinghy (RS Aero) and will probably use it for that too.

The device paired with the recommended camera works fantastic. If you're using it to review your technique, I think it's better than a go-pro.

My only complaint is that the arm band isn't really ideal for surfing. Before I ever used it, I emailed solo shot saying that it would easily fall off and was assured their user base didn't have a problem. Sure enough it fell off on a closeout barrel the first time I used it. That's a $150 replacement part.

I've since customized the arm band so that it can't come off. Let me know if you have any questions about the unit.

Shouldn't the camera let you track exactly where it is so you can find it?

The transmitter is normally on your arm (above water) to keep a signal with the base. As soon as it goes underwater the signal is lost.

They asked me if I had a floaty on it. So I asked them which floaty? The one you didn't include with the product, or the one you don't sell on your website?

Floaties are quite readily available aftermarket. Most boating / marine / rec stores.

Or on this newfangled thing called "The Internet" via "electronic commerce": http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=key%20float&i...

I just checked it out! That Internet thing is pretty cool!

However, I saw nothing in your hypertext link that would easily attach to the armband and not interfere with my stroke.

SoloShot should sell a floaty or provide one of those new-fangled affiliate links I hear the kids talking about these days to a compatible 3rd party floaty.

Surfing, right, we're not talking marathon swimming or similar?

Having stuff dangle off your arm is a PITA, I'll allow. But some way for attaching _something_ buoyant to the strap (not sure what it looks like my apologies), might be possible.

The drink -- she claims many toys....

Indeed. Ended up putting a button whole in the arm band and putting a button on my wetsuit.

Tracking might not work when it's ten feet underwater..

Less actually.

It will loose tracking on a duck dive and on wipe outs. It even has 'barrel mode' so that the camera will keep tracking on your vector should the signal cut out while you're shielded by the wave lip. Haven't had much use for that feature :(

Maybe you could have a feature that alerts authorities/friends if your tracking device is not detected for X time. In case you get sucked out to sea, eaten by a shark, etc.

In general, I've thought about how many deaths have been captured on film now between GoPros and the like. What a strange and awful thing to leave behind for your loved ones.

How precise is the tracking? Could you use it to track a close-up of a face reliably, or is it not that good?

You can't zoom to frame just your face. As I recall, the tightest zoom setting would be your body + 5-10 feet of surrounding area. In a walking test that worked well.

I wouldn't use that mode for live action sports through, since you'd want context in frame anyway. Even in the middle zoom mode, I found myself reacting to something off screen and though I should have gone wider.

Aren't you afraid of theft or loss of the equipment?

Yes and no.

Under normal circumstances there's no one on the beach that would take it because I'm surfing on the Outer Beach (4x4 by special permit required or boat)[1].

Outside of summer, there's pretty much no one at any beach to take it, especially in the winter.

Of course anytime a friend is one the beach with our stuff I don't have to worry.

However, I don't take it on surf trips to Costa Rica or California. A GoPro is much easier to pack anyway.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Orleans+Parks+%26+Beaches/...

This is badass. As an athlete whos heavily into extreme sports I'd buy one in a heartbeat.

I think you've got some JavaScript issues going on with your page, though, It keep jumping to the top of the page when I'm scrolling down.

I think it's when the movie cycles?

Agreed, this would be awesome for extreme sports. I'm wondering if it would track fast enough to follow a quadcopter around an FPV racing course.

We kitesurf and use GoPros, often on tripods on the beach. People come up and take them as soon as we're more than 200m away. It's quite easy for us to spot them, confront them and get it back. But it happens all the time

No. 1 rule - don't leave anything of value on the beach.

So next we need to add some stabilization to this platform and then you can just stick it out on a bouy ^_^

or weaponize the camera so that it can protect itself... :)

Maybe an autonymous paintball sentry?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxBa5bQfTGc

Or you have a drone that launches to chase the perp.

I've had multiple people try to take my beach chairs, so this isn't surprising at all.

What do this people say in their defense when you find them?

Usually they look guilty as hell, then cobble together something like "Oh, I was going to hand it in to the lifeguards." ... yeah, right. It's always adults too.

Don't get me started about dog owners letting dogs piss on our bags and clothes and cameras.

>People come up and take them as soon as we're more than 200m away.

I don't have this problem where I surf, but here's some thoughts I've had about it...

- Attach a motion alarm (made for purses and such) that will go off and at least attract attention if someone moves it.

- Put a sign on it that says "Do not touch. My buddy is watching this camera." or "Due to recent theft, I have a HIDDEN camera recording this camera."

I wonder if you could put up a sign that says:

"If you steal this camera you agree to pay a $200 fine" - just having a sign is a deterrent but not a strong one.

Though, a better idea is to attach a speaker to it and when someone steals it blast vulgar sounds through it like "I'M A MOFO THIEF LOOK AT ME HAHA". I doubt any thief would want attention drawn to what they just did.

I've been wanting to do a social experiment where I leave a laptop out with a GPS tracker and a note with my information and see what happens. My guess will be that many people will attempt to steal it.

This sort of candid camera experiment has been done many times, there are many who will return the items and some who won't. If you truly don't want your things stolen then you just need a buddy to watch your stuff.

There was AIMe [1] which was supposed to do much the same thing. But then, instead of shipping the $299 version they still advertise on their site, they decided to market a $5000 "professional" version instead.[2]

There's Pixio, which has a kickstarter.[3]

Soloshot is $399 on Amazon, with customer reviews, so it's a shipping product.[4]

Reviews of Soloshot indicate that it has a minimum range. You have to be at least 30 feet from the camera before it tracks properly.

[1] http://www.jebiga.com/aime-automatic-tracking-camera-mount/ [2] http://www.jigabot.com/launch/ [3] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/world-s-first-indoor-outd... [4] http://www.amazon.com/SOLOSHOT2-with-Base-and-Tag/dp/B00DSGI...

It's very cool, but the demo videos suggest that the tracking isn't ideal yet. Which susprises me, because we only have what, 50+ years of R&D with tracking moving targets. As in, if you can figure how how fast the target is moving across the field of view, you should be able to predict where it is going to be in the next frame, PLUS, take into account the latency of the Soloshot motor, and calculate that all together in real-time such that the target stays as close as possible to the center of the field of view. Right now, based on the demo videos, it appears that either the CPU is slow, or the Soloshot motor is slow, or both, with the result being that the target gets ahead of the Soloshot and gets to the edge of the field of view regularly, making for less than optimal viewing afterward.

Seems like a totally, well, 99% fixable problem, and given Soloshot's been out for a while I'm surprised the demos aren't more stellar.

Still, it's impressive and I'm surprised GoPro hasn't acquired the company already.

In practice, tracking has never been a problem for me. Have you seen the demos of it tracking quad copters?

The skier video on the website is just plain bad. The camera should zoom out slowly and smoothly, instead it was jerky.

Yeah, that one is bad. If I had to guess, I'd say that the further away you are, the more the camera is zoomed in, the more jagged the panning will seem, as the distance in one degree of arc at 100ft is much less than 1000ft.

I imagine this could have been easily taken out in post production.

was having similar thoughts. I was also wondering why the soloshot had to track a device you wear instead or in addition to something like openCV that can be trained on your face or physique.

No cameraman? No problem

30 minutes later,

No camera, problem.

Needs to be able to fly away when being stolen ;)

Andddd we're back to flying drone cameras.

It needs to work in reverse so you can follow the stolen camera.

That's why you have flying military drones with guns to protect stuff :)

Or a second one with a DIY-Sentry gun on top.. robot guards robot.

They can have an alarm mode actionable, only the person wearing the tag can approach without triggering an alarm if set ON. That would be pretty neat, and reassuring.

It seems like you'd still need to solve the problem of convincing anyone to leave their two thousand dollar DSLR unattended.

Not the same but there exists a microphone which can be thought of as an audio version of this: https://www.acousticmagic.com/ It senses the direction of the speaker and outputs audio from that direction filtering out audio from other directions. As different speakers in different locations speak it changes the direction it uses. It also outputs a location signal that can be used by software to, for example, have a computer position a camera toward the current speaker. (I don't have one - this is just based on the material I have read.)

You can also get entire rooms wired for this as well. I recently helped design one of our presentation rooms where the system (with the help of a lot of array mics) processes who is speaking and if the speaker puts the room into Q&A mode it will focus on / boost whoever is speaking. The intent was to get rid of the "could you repeat the question" issue (anyone who has ever been to a NYTM knows this one :)) or awkward pauses as an entire room waits for someone with a mic to walk over. It helps make recordings of Q&A much more natural and fluid.

Did that end up working well when you were done with setup?

Yes.. it works remarkably well and is tuned so your brain doesn't even notice the amplification. If, for example, the reverb is jacked up to make the room sound like a cathedral then your brain immediately knows it is "fake" -- but under normal settings unless the system was explained, someone in the room would not notice what is going on.

That's a technology that's been available custom for a while, but it's hard to deploy. There's a startup opportunity for someone to do a moderate-cost presentation system that's installed in conference rooms, hotels, and such that Just Works. Lighting control should be automated as well; if someone is projecting something, the lighting should be automatically adjusted for that.

And automate HVAC control properly, too. Put a temp/humidity/CO/CO2 sensor in the return air duct, and a motion detector in the room, and tie them into the HVAC controls. All conference rooms and college classrooms should have this, because the people load varies enormously from hour to hour. (As a room fills up, the temperature goes up and the CO2 content in the return air goes up. This tells the HVAC system to not only feed in more cold air, but to use less recirculated air and more outside air to bring the CO2 level down. This eliminates "stuffiness". If the CO level goes up, someone is smoking, fan speeds must rise and dampers dump the return air outside. When the room is empty, do one last air change, then drop to minimum HVAC levels and turn off almost all the lights.)

You can buy all this from Honeywell or Johnson Controls, but it's not well marketed, costs too much, and requires too much engineering during installation. Somebody needs to do an industrial-strength Nest startup.

That has got to be the worst intro text I've read in a long time:

> The Voice Tracker™ I can be used as an auxiliary microphone with conventional conferencing systems that have a good AEC. The Voice Tracker™ II has its own built in AEC, and consequently can be used with VoIP systems that do not have a robust AEC.

Looks really cool, though.

We got one of these for our office so the remote guys can hear during meetings and it is terrible. We'll all be sitting at a table, and the remote people can only hear every other person at the table. There are random empty spots where it doesn't hear, or it will put all of the focus on some people talking quietly on the other side of the room instead of the person talking right next to it. We've had the best luck with a Jabra microphone.

Perhaps it would work better in large rooms with only one person talking, but its hard to say. We also had good luck with the microphone on the dropcam, but people thought it was too much like a security camera and made them uncomfortable.

This seems much more useful:https://www.lily.camera/

However - I'll wait till the separate approaches are priced accurately before I form an opinion on which is better.

lily only lasts at best 18 minutes.

This is a fascinating product - I wrote about it a while ago over at http://www.strangecompany.org/will-your-next-cameraperson-be...

I'd love to get hold of one to do a practical test, actually... It strikes me as a much more immediately usable technology than the follow-drones, because the latter just look like they're certain to run into trees, and that's not a problem a tripod has.

From the FAQs:

Does SOLOSHOT2 work indoors?

Not yet. SOLOSHOT is currently an outdoor only product due to some of the technologies involved.

Anybody know why this is the case?

It's using GPS to figure out where the camera should point.

An educated guess would be that it uses GPS for location. It is often not possible to get a lock on the satellites indoors.

They're working on it however: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/126843-think-gps-is-cool-...

Is GPS really that accurate, though, that it'll locate you with enough accuracy to allow a camera to center on your position?

If it is indeed using GPS, I'm guessing it's using a GPS in the camera base too, to figure out the correction.

Short-baseline differential GPS with a base station can have cm-level accuracy, if I remember correctly.

That's what I was thinking. Both are viewing the same satellites, since they're close to each other. The base, since it knows it's stationary, can derive the corrections itself, and figure out where the object is.

I would theorize that they have GPS in both units, and the tag sends its position to the base. Along with a compass, you can pretty accurately tell where the camera is looking, and you can probably gauge the distance between the tag and camera by the time it takes for the signal to travel to the camera, but I'm not sure how that's useful.

Why not use bluetooth low-energy for this stuff? Or would you need to have three beacons to triangulate?

1) range 2) clock precision (you can't measure time fast enough to actually measure position using bluetooth)

> clock precision (you can't measure time fast enough to actually measure position using bluetooth)

Interesting, why is that and how fast would that be, then?

Also what's different about triangulating via WiFi APs signals, that bluetooth doesn't work?

GPS alone isn't really accurate enough by itself, but it's thought that SOLOSHOT integrates both GPS and an inertial system.

According to some of the amazon reviews, it doesn't work within 50 feet. I suspect it does in fact use GPS, as 50 feet would be far enough that you're going to be somewhere in the frame. Couple that with just measuring the delay time, and possibly a compass or something and you'd end up with what they have.

I could see this being used as a hands-free iPad stand for FaceTime, so it always points in the direction of the speaker.

From the site:

> Range: 10-2,000 ft

> Cameras: Supports up to 5-lbs

Is this meant to be for the US market only? If not, I'd recommend to provide internationally recognized units (mostly SI units), such as m and kg.

To those who downvoted this: Do you care to explain? What's wrong with criticizing overly US-centric business? In the world wide web, being more international should be good for companies as well as customers.

Did I miss something?

I think you miss that most people probably don't see this and say "Damn those US companies for using feet." Get over it?

I'm not talking about anti-US sentiment.

I'm talking about people looking at "10-2,000 ft" and asking themselves "Uggh ... how much was it, again?" Then they google for some unit converter. Then they stumble over "5-lbs", google again, but abort the search and decide it is not worth the trouble.

This is simply a bad user experience for the majority of their potential customers.

I'm from a country which uses Kg and meters. I can read the US units no problem.

I'm also from such a country, and most people I know have trouble with US units, even if their English is pretty good.

I like to think I'm pretty good at mental arithmetic. Converting feet (0.3) and inches (2.5) are easy enough to do with good accuracy, but lbs requires multiplying the number by 0.45 in your head. Sure I could do that, but it's hardly what I'd call "read the US units no problem", and definitely not something to expect of your general customer base.

The other option would be to try and get a mental "feel" for the size of a foot, 10 foot, what's 5 lbs of water look like, etc. I did something like that back when we switched from Dutch Guilders to the Euro, cause I knew it was going to stick around, so keeping a conversion in my head was just holding me back.

But with US units, nobody's switching, and further, there's no ubiquity in my IRL day-to-day life of things that are supposed to be exactly 1 lbs, 5 lbs, 1 gallon, 10 foot, etc. to calibrate with. The only time I come into contact with inches is in the abstract space of the Internet, where they mean nothing except a quick mental arithmetic puzzle getting in the way of what I actually want to know.

Looks to be an amazing piece of engineering but seriously, what's the usecase? It looks to be targeted at the amateur market ('shoot like the pros') and I just don't see the demand or workability in this space.

To pick on a few hinted at on the page:

A game of football: Leaving a camera on a tripod on the sideline while I'm focused on the game? Not in any park I've ever played in. Taking the stick from my teammates for being enough of a nerd to set this up?

Skiing: Putting a camera on a tripod, unattended, on the piste? Then get the lift up to the top so you can ski back down towards the camera? Again, I can't see this ending well for the poor old camera.

Dirt biking/other extreme sports: because people often do these alone, and so need an automated cameraman to get any filming done?

EDIT: reading some of these comments my opinion has changed, there are more compelling use cases for this than I first thought of (like letting the person who would have done the filming relax and watch the event, whilst still attending to the camera, that's a great one). This is amazing tech but the main limiting factor for now is the risk of leaving such expensive equipment unattended. When the price falls I have no doubt this will be an extremely widely used tech, as widely used as cameras themselves are now.

People like to take photos and videos of themselves. You don't need a reason, just some vanity. These will sell like hotcakes.

Sure, I guess the main thing it comes down to is cost, and likelihood of the camera being stolen or damaged when left unattended.

It's fundamentally very cool and if it was cheap enough to be essentially throw away, or at least pretty easily replaceable, I think there would be a massive demand. But that won't be true for a long time.

I think you're being a bit too pessimistic. As an amateur athlete, I can definitely see the utility (albeit limited) in this. There are lots of parks in my area (I live in Ottawa... obviously this is location specific) where I could set this up and not worry about it being stolen. And I wouldn't set this up for a game, but it would be useful while practicing/training - and my teammates would not give me shit about it.

I can't comment much on the other use cases that you've gone over, but as an amateur athlete this is totally something I could use. That said, I would rather rent this than own it.

> A game of football: Leaving a camera on a tripod on the sideline while I'm focused on the game? Not in any park I've ever played in. Taking the stick from my teammates for being enough of a nerd to set this up?

If it's affordable, I can see this being big with parents and coaches of youth athletes. Go to a children's soccer game (or ice hockey here in Canada) and see how many parents have their cameras out, but would rather be relaxing on their lawn chair than making sure they are catching all the action.

Now that is a good point. You could still have someone sitting near the tripod, but now they don't have to be paying attention to the camera-- they can enjoy the moment.

A lot of people for training also like to be able to record themselves and see what they need to work on. Often times you're alone training in a field or something and it could be nice to have the camera follow you.

I think you underestimate the utility. Think of parents or family members that attend football games. They're often stuck watching the game "through the viewfinder" if they want to film it ... this frees them up to look with their eyes. You also underestimate extreme sports where you want to film a trick over a given obstacle. This would be fantastic for skateboarders. Boxers who want to film themselves during a workout, or a fight to review their form could use this for sure.

etc. etc. ... just because you don't anecdotally see the demand doesn't mean it's not there ;)

yea, the problem is I highly doubt it actually works well for the football use case. Think about a basketball or football game. What happens when the QB fires a pass? How does the cam know which player to follow? What about a bball fastbreak where a bunch of players are moving and only one player is moving far ahead of the others, how does it know to follow him? For boxers, and skateboarders I could see this working easily though...

Can you just make it follow the ball? How big is the tag anyway?

When it's a football or basketball game, most people are only interested in one person - their kid. To hell with the quarterback. In a professional setting, there would be more than one camera anyway. It would make sense for each of the big deal athletes to have a tracking camera on them.

I'm surprised too that no one has mentioned the adult industry (either actual professionals or possibly among some amateurs / semi-pros). One could easily imagine this sort of ting being useful there, where quality is probably "good enough" and an actual cameraman too expensive.

Others have added that this version has a minimum range of 25 feet, which may scupper it for many, but long video lenses are available.

Skating with a filmer is often a social activity :-)

> Dirt biking...

Right. I'd buy it for that alone.

Seems like there are a lot of use cases for this. Take a backcountry ski outfit. Set a few of these up on your trails. Sell videos to people you charter. A ski resort could even use them instead of hiring people to go out and take videos/pictures. Also, there are loads of people who go surfing alone on remote beaches.

If you look at the success of GoPro, drones, etc. then this seems like a definite winner.

From my point of view - it means that as a run-and-gun shooter of narrative, I can essentially have an extra cameraman on tap.

That means I can shoot a close-up whilst it handles the wide, or in extremis it can shoot a wide shot and I can hold the boom mic :)

Given the cost of the SoloShot is less than 1 day of hiring a camera op who knows what they're doing, it's a pretty good deal.

I agree. It's very neat, but I can't see where the users will be.

Most outdoor events, I wouldn't leave a camera on a tripod alone.

I thought it might be useful for people who make Youtube videos: these people usually work alone and it's a hassle to get actors sometimes--but in these situations, we have the tech for cheaper to already control the camera from a little far away with more control so I can't see that really having a lot of user base either.

I agree that its uses are probably more practically limited than the demo videos show. However, event photography and videography are pretty big sub-markets.

A few drone flying things that are sort of similar:

https://hexoplus.com/

https://www.airdog.com/

https://www.lily.camera/

I'm not sure these are the ones I originally read about, so there may be a few more.

This would probably work better for the skiing/hiking/other type case, provided the drone doesn't fly into something or drown.

I like that it can do the motion time lapse thing too though and it obviously would have a lot more run time.

None of these actually exist yet. It's just a bunch of concept videos.

Here's what the current experience is actually like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td5fZhGNz9M

I could see an artist doing timelapse of their art project using this. Although I'm not sure they'd need the tracking ...

How about a construction site timelapse? Again, not sure about needing the tracking...

The autotracking timelapse was the most interesting part, maybe for a really slow moving _thing_, but I can't think of one...

Have you ever seen the average non-professional try to work a camera to follow any kind of motion? So maybe in cases where it's likely that your camera will walk off, you leave somebody to guard the whole rig—this thing looks like it will almost certainly take a better video or series of photos than the average person.

As a parent it would be a very welcome thing to be able to watch something your kids are doing and record it at the same time without sacrificing the quality of either experience.

I think this is one of the best use cases outside of the sports market. I really dislike sitting behind a lens for lots of subtle experiences with kids, but at the same time I want a nice recording of it afterwards. It seems like this would help with that situation.

Youtube. Fitness. Podcasting.

Immediate use: presentations, accurately tracking the speaker without having to hire someone to keep camera on subject the whole time. Even moreso when multiple cameras. Just need one A/V control booth person, much cheaper to buy several of these than hire several cameramen.

Think TED Talks, Apple Keynotes, anything fairly big-budget where chasing the random motions of the speaker just doesn't look on par with the money going in & out of the presentation.

Yes, agreed, this pro use case is an instant, no-questions-asked sell.

Some Cisco cams can do that.

And it would be a use case for the defunct(?) Microsoft Kinect 2.

Except this product is outdoor-only.

Care to explain? Does it have a GPS that makes it stop working when it gets inside?

Live production is ALL about reliability. A boring lights-up lights-down corporate show ALWAYS has 2 $100,000 light boards in active/hot standby even though one $50 DMX controller would do.

We always opt for wired where possible, even if wireless exists. We are paranoid about secure and safe cable runs. When wireless is necessary, we transmit on multiple frequencies with smart frequency-hopping algorithms so that if two of them get interference, the content still comes through on the third.

We have a visceral distrust of rechargeable batteries. We swap out AAs and 9-volts (only the brands we trust) obsessively. A good sound engineer is made very uncomfortable by (and thus obsessively monitors) battery-powered devices in the critical path.

In short: there's no way you're going to get respectable production companies to trust this thing. One, it flies, Two, it's battery. Three, it's RF. Under these circumstances, we proceed with EXTREME caution. We'd much rather build truss to get a camera where it needs to go, run cables to it, mat and tape them as appropriate. Automation is okay, but there is existing, battle-tested camera automation and it's not even that widespread yet.

Film production, maybe. A blown take isn't free, but it's pretty cheap. A flying camera at WWDC hitting battery starvation, motor failure, RF interference, etc. is the end of the world in that line of work.

Ok. Just noting that the product discussed here, doesn't actually fly. It's not a drone.

"Looks to be an amazing piece of engineering but seriously, what's the usecase? "

This product is almost a reverse example of why you can't ask people of whether they need your product (Steve Jobs examples) since they could overestimate what they would buy until it comes time to actually do so.

My first reaction was "this is cool I have to have one!" and I thought of one case in particular where I was trying to film my car accelerating (a 911) but couldn't get my wife to come with me and besides she wouldn't do a good job anyway. But then I thought "well is filming that event important enough to get involved with this product at that price point and do I really need another practically single use gadget to have to deal with and learn to use?" I still haven't even bought a quadracopter with video (new dji 4 model) and it's not for price reasons. In the end I am thinking "ok so I will have all of this cool video then what do I do with the video exactly?" It's not that I wouldn't enjoy using these types of things but I have toys that I don't have the time to play with right now.

When I was younger and studying martial arts extensively, I would have killed for something like this. Mirrors only get you so far, and I only had so many patient friends who would sit around and film me so I could work on my technique.

I can see it having similar utility for people studying dance (solo, ballroom, etc.)

When I lived in the US I used to run the camera to record basketball games of our women's team every now and then. AFAIK pretty much all high school teams do it for analysis. Instantly gets better with this (assuming it can track well enough, the examples with bad scrolling tend to be focused on following a single person)

One of the cool features is outside of the band tracking: you can upload a file to the Soloshot to do some awesome timelapse panning. Useful for a lot of situations including celestial or just those generally gorgeous long pans.

(http://www.soloshot.com/dslr-motion-timelapse-written-instru...)

If you're at all into photography this thing has a ton of usefulness at the price point.

On the other hand, this represents a great business opportunity for ski resorts. The ski resort has a few soloshots mounted near the snowboarding rail park, and $5 lets you wear a tracking armband for 5 minutes. Drop it in the bucket at the end of your run, get an ID number which will allow you to download your footage at the end of the day.

In fact, if a ski resort wanted throw a ton of money at this problem, they could put soloshots along the entire mountain, and you rent an armband for an entire run down the mountain. That would however require sophisticated software on their end to collate all of the camera feeds and stitch together a single video file of your run down the mountain.

That is brilliant. But nothing says they have to stitch the video for you. Giving you access to all your clips would be enough, specially if there is some footage overlap. You might want to transition from one clip to the next in a unique way.

The problem I see with that setup though would be deciding which person to follow when two trackers are competing for camera time. I imagine the base has some sort of logic to make that decision but it would suck to be the person that keeps getting missed because you are always right behind someone that the base gave a higher priority.

This is begging for an API or open source firmware. Impressive technology applied to something with limited practical usefulness.

For starters, I'd like to decouple the tracking system from the tags.

I'd cheerfully pay sticker price for just the tracking system, no tripod required (assuming I hadn't overspent on media gadgetry already this quarter, anyway).

I would too, but I want to track things I can't put a tag onto. Wildlife, cars speeding past my house. If I could hook it up to an arduino with infrared sensors that would be awesome.

I agree...I would buy it almost immediately if it could track an adidas smart ball...

I've seen some interesting points in this thread about target users of the product and the big issue seems to be:

- Target user group is unlikely to spend this much on the type of equipment and/or isn't technically inclined enough to leverage it.

At first glance I'd say this is fair, based on traditional markets and camera use but I'd argue 2 things:

1. The demand of this type of product is likely to rise. As self broadcasting goes up, the demand of this type of ingenuity will rise. What Twitch is doing for gaming, this could help bring along for many other areas of interest.

2. Through internal development or by going open source, the development of tracking could be increased to support a number of different objects. Pucks/Balls in sports in particular could be very interesting to automate the recording of sporting events.

With these 2 points noted, I can imagine the use of these in a number of scenarios- for consistency of an argument, I'll take the use case of hockey.

If I'm a minor league hockey team, if I can obtain the proper quality of cameras at a reasonable enough price to surround my rink, along with the proper tracking system applied to each player and devices of the game (pucks, nets), and if I can coordinate this with software to turn on which devices I follow per camera at any point, I could create a system for broadcasting a top quality version of my game online without the cost of camera men as well as the space that may be required for the setup.

Additionally, if I'm the team, I could use this in practice to follow each of my players setting a camera to each so that I can review their particular actions and do video review with each - without having to limit what gets taped for each guy or having multiple camera guys at each practice.

Add this to object recognition software and I could start using the cameras to collect more about where people are on the ice during games and plays and push along my ability to analyze what is happening and how I can work on tactics/strategy to manage it.

Again, a lot of this is relying on additional software/tracking/processes but I believe as a technology, it's empowering. I'm not sure the current use case/expected market is ready for this (or at least not in the form it's likely to have technically) but I believe in a few iterations, we'll see something that serves a significant market share, especially if the product roadmap includes abilities and integrations to further its use with other software and mutiple unit tracking capabilities.

...and if you're the facility, you're renting the film to the team.

Also, from experience an increasing amount of the coaching of youth soccer is outsourced to coaching companies (like QuickStrike or PlayersEye), and some of them are starting to include video analysis in their packages.

And then there is, for what it's worth, recruiting films. There's a lot of people trying to video their kids and putting together a college recruitment highlight reel.

People doing that would be happy to drop what is, in reality, not very much money to help put together something they hope will save them $10Ks in tuition

Awesome, I always wanted to make one of these. I had the idea about 10 years ago, when I was really into making stunt videos and timelapses as a teenager. This was way before Raspberry Pis and Arduinos, so I think it would be a lot easier today. Of course there's a huge difference between a hobby project, and a commercial product. But watching all of those Youtube videos was like seeing my idea come to life.

Seems to me the Lilly is a better product and can do what this one does more or less, check it out, I love it, wish I had the money to get one. They are several discounted if you pre-order, around 600, then almost 1000 when they are officially on sale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWrApA8oRbI

Not sure if it's necessarily better. The Lilly also requires a tag to work, but it can only handle 20 minutes of battery with no way to insert a backup. This is relatively low-tech and seems to be capable of enhancing your existing hardware, rather than replacing it. That's a big win.

Still, the Lilly is really cool.

Different use cases. Soloshot lasts for 4 hours. If you are doing an athletic endeavor you are likely doing it for longer than 20 minutes

Seems like some serious tech. It looks to be using GPS and some wireless signals to determine distance and direction?

Im guessing GPS because their user manual says it can only be used outdoors.

I wonder if it can be miniaturized in future versions- seems like you could eliminate GPS if you used a synthetic aperture bluetooth or wireless receiver to determine direction and ranging for tracking.

Site is crawling for me - cdn.shopify doesn't seem to be handling the traffic well.

The waterfall shows one image occupying almost the entire load time: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/shop.soloshot.com/JKiP7lSv

Search on YouTube to get some practical demos. They're pretty cool.

(Not OP but I follow this sector pretty closely.)

I can see even school sports teams using these for player video tracking - imagine being able to analyse every player individually even as an amateur.

Although that would probably require some nifty software to make the 16-odd hours of footage resulting from a single football match useful...

Also that's a lot of DSLRs.

As a hobby, I drive racecars. I have been thinking about something like this near the track to video me going by. (Far away vantage points look boring.)

It seems like for much less than $500 you could build an RPI and just track moving objects via optical flow (assuming you are alone on the track.)

LeMons racer? That's the first application I thought of but when are you ever alone on track?

You could throw one or two of these in common passing places and combine that feed with in car video. You could get some really neat video.

SCCA Spec Miata. I rent the track privately sometimes.

This would have been much more exciting if it were closer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfQC0135Vfs

Does anyone know how this and the other cameras in this field (e.g. Lily) do subject tracking? A few people have commented in this thread that it might be a combination of GPS and inertial tracking, but does anyone know any specifics?

Would it be possible to mimic these features in post prod? Essentially gather a giant high res shot, using the money spent on fancy feature on higher res. Then run the same algorithms in post to get a similar video?

Not really. The level of resolution necessary is an obstacle. Additionally, having a rotating tripod mount as part of the flow means the angle of view is changing, as opposed to a static angle you describe. That said, it could be faked, but wouldn't be the same.

Makes sense. Thanks!

You could go up to 4K video for $1500 or so. But that will only get you 4 1080p screens stitched together, so you can really only focus in on a quadrant.

The uncle from Napoleon Dynamite is super excited for this.

Like many ideas I have had, I'm both happy and sad. I had this idea a good 5 years ago. Kicking myself, but then again, I' not a hardware guy.

I had the idea too, maybe even 10 years ago. But don't worry, it's not like you narrowly missed winning the lottery. Building a product like this takes years of dedication and hard work.

It's a fairly obvious idea; the difficulty is definitely in execution, not conception.

Place a remote controlled gun next to that camera and you have a remote hunting system? (probably illegal in most jurisdictions though)

Uh, one that shoots at you? How are you going to get the tracking beacon onto your target?

Setup system across from office entrance a month beforehand. Drop the tag into the target's coat at restaurant coat check. Trigger remote system based on proximity. Someone's probably already done this in a spy movie.

It'd be a much better idea to simply have a remote controlled system, using tech that's been around for decades. Though I suppose if you're truly paranoid, you might be worried about signals tracking. Maybe have it connected to the Internet and use thermite to wipe out the evidence after shooting.

couldn't you use the signal from the target's phone instead? ... cell, wifi or bluetooth.... whichever suits you

I use a radio remote for my DSLR that gives me about a 100 meter range. I wish there was a version of this for Iphones

My primary use-case for this would be to go back in time and replace my wedding videographer with this robot.

That's so cool. How does it stop itself getting stolen? Oh wait, I guess it just films the thief... :-D

I can see this functionality being integrated into some cameras.

Does it have a built in anti-theft deterrent?

But seriously, this is one exciting piece of technology. Very, very cool.

For some reason the page keeps scrolling back to the top in my browser, very annoying.

If only they could solve that 200 year old problem of having a website that you can actually scroll through.

If only websites trying to be trendy could stop using eye popping font size 70 text that cause me to roll my chair back 10 feet to read the web page.

All of the above + auto-playing videos.

Will all due respect, for an old guy, I like large fonts :)

Then zoom-in your pages.

I'm not old, but I also like large fonts. Except for sites that completely break if you zoom too much (like HN), there's not problem with designers using small ones.

If only I could time travel into the future and ask your 30 year older self whether you agree with your 30 year younger self's comment. :)

Same here on Chrome latest version. I really wish sites would stop hijacking the scroll :/

It doesn't "film" anything and, yes, that irritates me.

Ed powers is going to love this.

Use a drone! :).

ShowHN?

It's a good product until your camera weights more than 1kg...

that won't matter for most use cases. the heavier the camera setup the more likely manual control is desired or required anyway. this is more for set-and-forget kind of shooting. On the video they've got a good size DSLR with an autofocus lens on it. If it can carry that, it's gonna work for people.

Where are you getting this from? It says it supports a wide range of DSLRs.

The site says they support 5 lbs, which is 2.268 kg.

Wow, I've been making professional and entertainment videos for over 12 years (I'm not a camera man), and I would never use this. You can't replace human skill with this. At least not if you want to produce something really outstanding. I suppose this is fine for mediocre content, but then why bother in the first place?

>You can't replace human skill with this.

What people have been saying for nearly 100 years now. Every time, they've been wrong.

You can replace nothing with this, though, which is what most people have access to. I don't think anyone expects these to spit out Kubrick films. But I bet it records better than I do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com