Wearable Computers Should Never Have Cameras
The early inventors of wearables all told me — ‘Don’t put a camera on that thing!’
Over a decade ago, I began reporting on “wearable computing.” Back in the ‘90s and ‘00s, this meant interviewing DIY hardware hackers who’d built their own rigs.
They discovered some pretty cool uses for a head-mounted computer. Often they used their wearable as a form of “extended memory” — they’d jot down notes on the fly and retrieve them when needed, even years later, peering into their tiny eye-level screens. They also liked to engage in ambient, floating text-chat with friends. Wearables, they all told me, could amplify your cognition.
But the one thing nearly everyone told me?
If you put a camera on your wearable computer, it creeps people out.
“In the early days, people had this allergic reaction to the idea that people would be recorded,” as Thad Starner, a wearable pioneer, told me in 2011. It was obvious why. If you had a camera mounted on your head, everyone around you became deeply self-conscious, worried that you were recording something they were doing in private. As a result, Starner’s hand-built, head-mounted wearable generally didn’t have a camera.
