I was given an Autographer this week to try out. Here are some impressions.

The GPS lock took forever to acquire. Actually in a couple of cases it just didn’t pick it up at all and there is no location data attached to my photos. I was standing still out in the open for about 10 minutes before I decided to give up and just walk around without the lock. When in the settings screen, you can see how close it is to gaining a lock. I was under the impression that if it said ‘Low’ then that means it has a lock but it is inaccurate but it turns out this is a measure of how close you are to gaining a lock. You have to wait for it to go through Low, Medium, High and Lock before it will collect GPS data. Another time I gained a lock within 3 minutes so it appears to be very flaky.

The build quality of the device is pretty crap, it feels about the same quality as a $30 MP3 player. The buttons rattle around and the camera shutter is loose and clicks like a cheap toy. It’s unfortunate for a device that is around $400, I’m glad I didn’t pay for it. I’m not sure how they justify the price when there are phones with all the sensors included in the Autographer and more for around the same price.

The image sensor is not great, pictures are often blurry, have blown out highlights, and low light quality isn’t too good. It also auto-exposes to strange results.

Thoughts I had whilst wearing the device:

• Don’t wear headphones, they get in the way.
• We’ll be capturing a lot of photographic information and their locations, including peoples faces, car number plates and that kind of thing. Will we need to be mindful of privacy concerns. Will we have to blur out this information, and is there an easy way to do this?
• When I’m walking somewhere at my own pace, I often turn my head and glance around at my surroundings. I often notice little things happening around my, like interactions between people. This won’t be picked up by the camera if I’m turning my head to the side too much.
• I felt pretty self conscious when I was wearing the device, I thought people would be weirded out by being recorded. Most people didn’t seem to notice, and no one asked me about it. I wondered if there was an algorithm we could run on the photos to detect if someone was looking at the camera.
• It was looking like it was going to rain for most of the time I was using the device, I would like to know how water resistant it is.
• I read something about taking photos to remember something actually makes you forget it more easily. So if I’m wearing the Autographer, will I more easily forget what happened during the day? Do you more easily forget lectures when you write down notes?
• I often notice people’s mannerisms and actions, but will I remember them when I look back over the photos?
• If we stuck two Autographers together, would they take photos at the same time since they run with the same algorithm?
• A few things happened to me that couldn’t have been picked up, like a bus splashing water on the back of my legs.
• I pressed the sequence button a couple of times, and sometimes I couldn’t figure out how to stop them. It’s difficult to see the screen and operate the device when wearing it on your shirt collar.

The Autographer has very limited functionality. It provides interfaces to create videos of photo sequences, but thats the only way you can export anything from the program. Data takes a back seat to the photos, all the data is there in the corner, and there is a map to show where each photo took place, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to export the data without diving in to the Autographer library files. Even then it appears to have changed the format of the data from what was stored on the device. Volker has said we should copy all data from the device itself instead of using the software.