A company called ZionEyez wants to help you live-stream your entire life to Facebook, with its not-at-all-ridiculous webcam shades.
New technologies often suffer from one of two problems: either the idea is bad, or the product is mere vaporware. Every once in a while, though, there comes along a special gadget that's both.
At first I thought that the glasses above, Eyez from ZionEyez, were one of those perfect storms of badness.
I'm not willing to back off my position on the terribleness of this idea. Not satisfied to leave obsessive self-casting in the contained realm of a site like justin.tv, ZionEyez wants to make you able to stream a constant video feed from your life to Facebook (a feat it would achieve through a combination of camera, Bluetooth, and proprietary app in development). It thinks that the barrier to constant broadcasting on Facebook isn't propriety or restraint or a last vestigial sense of social boundaries, but rather arm strength. "Many recorded video streams are short, largely because it is uncomfortable for users to continuously hold their cameras up for longer than a few minutes," writes ZionEyez on its site. It thinks that since we're too lazy to lift our iPhones to stream video, we'd do better to have a camera embedded in our eyeglass frames.
On the second charge, though--that of vaporware--I'm willing to back off somewhat. True, this soundless, triumphal, but ultimately empty video had me very worried.
[youtube Rsd8uAL7IG8]
But ZionEyez at the very least has managed to convince others of its sincerity. Its Kickstarter page is actually a screaming success; it has outstripped its $55,000 goal already by more than $6,000--and there are still 52 days to go. Four backers have given over $500 each. ZionEyez will receive funding at the end of July, and it has begun taking preorders.
On its Kickstarter page, ZionEyez says that its engineering team "contributed to the development of the FLIP Video camera." Joe Taylor, ZionEyez's CTO, is mentioned by name; he got his B.S. from Purdue in 2005 and since worked in a variety of engineering projects, per his LinkedIn.
"We have a motto at ZionEyez; it is 'Join the Movement,'" they write on their Kickstarter page. Here's hoping, for their investors' sake, that the movement isn't just a cult.
[Image: ZionEyez]
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