Years ago, Steve Mann made Cool Site of the Day with his Wearable Wireless Webcam. Now, almost a decade later, you can order the DejaView CamWear Model 100 hat or glasses-mounted camera, which continually records a 30-second buffer of video so you can push a button and start recording from before you even know you wanted to. Price will be $399, available “in January” (so they’d better hurry!)
I don’t expect this first-generation product to make a big splash, but I do believe in the vision of always-ready wearable cameras and microphones with this sort of record-30-seconds-into-the-past kind of feature. The story is somewhat compelling for consumers (“when your baby makes that great smile, you can capture it and grab the best frame as a picture”) but even more so for industry and inspection, where you’re more concerned with documenting an event than with the artistry of the video.