
Google Clips is a new $249 wearable camera - forgotmysn
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/04/google-clips-is-a-new-249-smart-camera-that-you-can-wear/
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excalibur
> It also doesn’t use any kind of network connection, so it’s not broadcasting
> the stuff it captures anywhere.

> Plus, it’ll alert you when its lens is blocked via intelligent notifications
> to your phone.

One of these statements is inaccurate.

(Comment edited to be more easily demonstrable.)

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joshuamorton
>It also doesn’t use any kind of network connection,

Bluetooth is not normally considered a network connection.

(I work at Google, but have nothing to do with Clips)

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jszymborski
This Clip networks with your phone which presumably sends that to Google
servers for AI purposes which also presumably means for data storage so that
better models can be trained.

Listen, this statement clearly is made to address privacy concerns, and it
does so in an irresponsibly misleading way.

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s17n
They explicitly said that it doesn't sent the images to Google servers, AI is
done locally on the phone.

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danvoell
There is a lot of bashing in the comments. I kind of like this. I wonder how
many people in the comments have multiple kids. After the first kid you kind
of stop taking pictures because you don't have the hands and/or mental
capacity. I could also see something like this working in a school. It's
always interesting to know what your kids are working on. Our teacher took
about 1500 pics last month. I don't see this as much different.

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rakoo
I really love the idea. I totally agree that sometimes you want a camera
always filming everything to capture the instants, because when you take your
phone out it's already too late and you can't really reenact it. That's a good
thing.

What I, and I believe others didn't like, is the text and the message, which
is not even hidden at this point: Google sees and knows everything about you,
your family, your favorite moments. I didn't even see how that was useful for
the user -- I certainly want to categorize my Moments so I can easily find
them again, but I'm not sure I want Google to _know_ about it. And yet that's
exactly what it says.

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UnoriginalGuy
As the article very clearly says, this camera is a self contained unit,
nothing is sent back to Google. If you want to upload your photos to e.g.
Google Photos you can, but you have to manually do that.

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jimduk
We built a consumer product like this back in 2013 - Autographer. The hard
bits were i) battery life, ii) taking good pictures when moving, iii) having a
socially acceptable & nicely designed product that points in the right
direction, iv) connectivity, v) wide FOV camera module vi) How to subselect &
create the best picture/video experiences (intelligence & creativity) vii)
Who/when/what it was really for.

In 2017 v) is solved, i)/ii)/iv) are easier, google should be able to do vi)
as well as anyone, let's see about vii). Anyway good luck to them and I'll be
buying one.

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a3_nm
Battery life is 3 hours, and this seems ridiculously low for something that's
designed to be left running without supervision.

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rpowers
This camera gives me the absolute creeps. If someone has this in their home
I'd ask them to put it in a drawer.

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rakoo
When the video ended, I thought I just watched the introduction to a new Black
Mirror episode. Really didn't feel at ease.

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rpowers
"Go Transparent w/ Google" should be their tag-line. The other commenter on
this thread was right about the 'The Circle' comparison.

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Invictus0
Seems like this would definitely have a place in a lot of people's lives: it
makes photography natural, easy, and simple. It solves the problem of spending
time processing and pruning photos, in an age when most people take photos by
pressing the shutter button 20 times and praying. However, I think the target
audience for this thing would pass at $250, especially when the single most
important selling point on smartphones is the camera.

This is part of the manifestation of Google's big bet on hardware; the same
way they used to put out tons of shitty software just to see what stuck, now
they will do the same with hardware. Luckily, hardware breaks, so it will be
less painful when your camera dies and is discontinued than when Google pulls
the plug on their dead services with little ceremony or redress.

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stesch
First step to "The Circle". :-)

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Diederich
Missed the reference...can you expand on that?

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stesch
In the movie "The Circle" a big company (a mixture of Google and Facebook)
invents a small camera that you can put everywhere that records everything and
broadcasts it for everyone.

A post privacy future.

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Diederich
Huh, I've never heard of this movie. I've been pretty disconnected from normal
popular culture for some time. Thanks!

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soared
For all you wondering who the target market is or how people would trust
google's camera in everyday life, think outside of the hn bubble. Wouldn't
you're grandma or mom like to capture moments like these? They don't have to
remember to take pictures, they don't need to sort through photos, etc.

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camillomiller
Google hardware efforts make me cringe. How can they be so tone-deaf? Why
creating something that pretends to help you creatively while actually
flattening all the differences, nuances and creative glitches or imperfections
down to a uniformed stylistic template? Seriously, I don't get it.

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cromwellian
Most people who take pictures of their kids don't want to be photographers,
they don't want to think about composition, or lighting, they just want a good
memory.

Cameras have become more and more automated over the years. Auto focus, auto-
exposure, auto-iso, burst mode hdr, portait lighting, and pretty soon,
computational photography and AI on camera devices is going to just let you
take a continuous burst of images, recognize the best compositions, and choose
those.

Some people will scream death of art and creativity, but true auteurs can
still go manual mode if they want. Other people will be freed up to do other
things while not having to worry about taking bad shots.

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CobrastanJorji
Exactly. I have small kids. I love taking pictures of my kids, but I hate
having to choose between being in the moment and taking pictures. This thing
is amazing to me.

The only thing is that I would probably only use it if I expected there to be
something capturable, like Christmas morning or a first day on the school bus
or some special outing at a Playground or Disney or something. I'm not sure
it's worth it for just those occasions. If something spontaneously adorable
happens, it probably will be in a drawer and out of battery. But I'm sorely
tempted. Hanging it on the Christmas tree might be amazing.

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huangc10
What's the target market? All the marketing material on Google's site seemed
to be aimed towards a family oriented theme. Have you ever thought, "oh, let's
take a few photos while we make cookies in the POV of the kitchen table"...?

Has anyone needed something that is "candid" but also "not candid" (because
you placed the camera there...)?

Maybe if they targeted sports, or security it'll make more sense?

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dragonwriter
> What's the target market?

Parents.

> All the marketing material on Google's site seemed to be aimed towards a
> family oriented theme.

That's not accidental.

> Have you ever thought, "oh, let's take a few photos while we make cookies in
> the POV of the kitchen table"...?

Not that specifically, but, as a parent of a young child, I have thought “I
wish I had a camera that I could basically place and forget” quite a lot.

I'm skeptical about the AI choosing good shots to capture, but if it's even
remotely good at that, I suspect it will do pretty well.

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lalos
I actually had a similar device called Narrative which went down some months
ago. It was weird having a camera all day and when I did want to go back and
check a specific moment the photo was almost always blurry. I did use it to
create time lapses and that was pretty neat because of the small size of the
device.

Link for the curious: [http://getnarrative.com](http://getnarrative.com)

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mattnewton
My SO bought one of these and she had trouble finding a place to put it on her
where it wasn’t pointing slightly up at an awkward angle. A lot of the
positions in marketing shots don’t fit female anatomy, and a necklace leaves
it flying about taking blurry sideways photos. It’s a cool product for QS type
people but didn’t seem useful in practice.

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vyrotek
Reminded me of similar but simpler product I saw on KS called FOMO
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1784759196/fomo-the-
mos...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1784759196/fomo-the-most-
wearable-and-customizable-camera)

~~~
legohead
Even more relevant: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bbutton/benjamin-
button...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bbutton/benjamin-button-the-
worlds-1st-smart-camera-for-fa/description)

1) Meant to take video of your family

2) Identifies 'moments' and cuts them up for you so you don't have to do all
the video editing yourself.

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skinnymuch
But this Benjamin Button is DOA right? It ever launched. Seems like it's
cancelled and a vague saying that they'll be back.

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jconn
Does anyone else think that this camera taking pictures based on who you spend
the most time with could be really depressing? "How come there are no photos
of my kids and a whole album of my boss with fancy filters added?"

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asp_hornet
it might help you rethink who you spend your time with before its too late to
change it.

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saikit
The first thing I thought was that this was a civilian body cam.

Coincidentally, the police in my current hometown are also trying out a Google
product for their body cams.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-jersey-city-using-
cell-p...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-jersey-city-using-cell-phone-
cameras-as-alternative-to-body-cams/)

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taylorlapeyre
Never thought I'd see the day when Google would make a Gopro competitor.

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DarronWyke
There's a huge market for Gopro and Contour. Makes sense that Google will
attempt to capture some of it.

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bigzoo
If I get one of these, I want not only the option for AI-powered clips, but
for every second of video/audio to be stored, tagged, classified, and
analyzed:

1) Spoken word

Every spoken word is transcribed. Every word is tagged to the right person.
All speech is automatically analyzed for intonation and emotion (perhaps, in
part, by the AI analyzing facial expression).

2) Written word

Every word that is read/seen by the camera (as in books, magazines, receipts,
brochures, highway signs, TV commercials, license plates) is OCRed and stored.

3) People

Every person is tagged (something like the way Google Photos does it). Since
there is now audio for every frame/video, Google's machine-learning AI will
make it super accurate. Facial expressions will be analyzed, along with vocal
intonation, to tag person's emotions, mental state, etc.

4) Location

Everything will be GPS-tagged.

Great start, but so much more I'd like to see.

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alkonaut
Even if the thing has zero hardware capability to communicate I can't overcome
my gut feeling that the thing is an ad targeting data mining device. There is
basically nothing google could say or write at this point about one of their
devices that would make me think they respect my privacy.

~~~
PascLeRasc
Wait for an iFixit teardown or some other third party to verify that there
isn't external communication hardware.

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icebraining
Well, and then teardown the mobile app used to see the photos.

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gr3yh47
FTA:

>It also doesn’t use any kind of network connection, so it’s not broadcasting
the stuff it captures anywhere. You can connect to your phone to check what
you’ve got.

I'd add:

and, once connected, undoubtedly upload everything captured automatically to
google for ad services, datamining, and machine learning.

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jimrandomh
The ad copy for this says "100% private. No Internet needed to capture." But
the last time Google sold a camera-oriented device, Google Glass, it would
upload all the pictures it took to Google's servers without any way to stop it
from doing so. And Google gave out instructions to stop it from uploading
pictures, but the instructions didn't work. Can an engineer from Google, who
has looked at the code or at the network traffic, say confidently that this
isn't uploading all your pictures to Google's servers?

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20644764/prevent-
google-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20644764/prevent-google-glass-
from-auto-uploading-photos)

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soared
Are you accusing Google of just outright lying? One product says you don't
need a network connection, the other heavily relied on a network connection.

~~~
jimrandomh
I'm saying that Google has had an internal miscommunication about this exact
question in the past. That's different from lying, but it does undercut the
credibility of their statement, and so I'd like to hear it from someone who's
able to check, rather than someone on the marketing side.

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BHSPitMonkey
It was very unambiguously an emphasized part of the keynote that they talked
about in detail, not a passing misunderstandable remark. And when the public
has their hands on these, it would be trivial to see if it violates this
claim.

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brosky117
> interestingly Google doesn’t seem to be eager to provide info on how many
> megapixels the sensor has.

Whenever it showed shots from the camera POV in the promo video, it looked
like the pictures would be pretty low res.

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rand0mbits
12MP from what I've read

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skinnymuch
The battery life appears to be three hours. That's incredibly disappointing at
such a price point. You'd think it should be $100 max if the battery can't
even last half a day

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sharpercoder
15FPS? Why on earth make that design decision? Isn't 30FPS nowadays considered
substandard?

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CobrastanJorji
As I understand it, it's not for videos. It's 15 photos per second, any of
which might be the one you keep. But maybe I misunderstand that and someone
can correct me.

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jasonmaydie
250$ for a 16 frame per sec hidden camera with some machine learning nonsense
thrown in?

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atomi
It's just business.

Let the people buy what they want.

We know that you could build something similar with a $6 Aliexpress camera, $1
motion sensor and a $5 rpi zero from Microcenter but we're not the market.

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usaphp
It's just an opinion, let the people express their thoughts, comments are here
for that reason.

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patrickxb
Who keeps flour in a bag like that?

