At 5:30 am, you crawl out of your hotel bed and start bundling up. You’re at the Grand Canyon, and you’ve been told the sunrises are incredible. Your six-year-old daughter is already up and ready to go.
As you watch the sun crest over the purplish gorge, slowing revealing rainbow colors, you smile. Your phone is safely stowed in your pocket, but you’re not missing a thing. The little Memoto camera on your collar is capturing everything.
Memoto raised $550,000 on Kickstarter in November for a device that’s just 3.6 centimeters wide. But their goal is far from tiny: creating a photographic memory of your life so you never miss special moments, or blissfully mundane ones either.
The 5 MP Memoto camera automatically takes a photo every 30 seconds (or another interval you choose). If you want to take a special shot, like your daughter smiling in front of the newly risen sun, just give it a tap. Then, analyzing location, time, color, composition, and faces, the Memoto software organizes your day into “moments.” When you open up the upcoming Memoto app, you’ll see 30 key moments per day.
Cofounder and CMO Oskar Kalmaru believes memories are key to our humanity; in fact, he did an anthropological survey of sorts before creating Memoto. He asked many people why they took photos; they told him: to relive experiences, to capture moments they wouldn’t otherwise, to notice things they could improve on, and to pass on memories to kids.
“Our memories constitute who we are and they play an important role for our self-perception. Stories about ourselves and our surroundings help us understand our context and make sense of it. I think knowing more about our past is a universal and eternal interest humans have,” Kalmaru says. He even clipped a Memoto onto his two-year-old son, capturing memories from a baby’s-eye view that his son can watch when he’s older.
Memoto costs $279, and will be shipped in May. Even if you don’t like to relive the past, this tiny camera offers you the opportunity to live more in the present – never missing a beautiful sunrise, or a smile from a loved one, because you’re angling for the perfect shot.
