A Wearable Camera That Would Turn Into a Drone and Fly Off Your Wrist

Gary Mortimer

Kate Knibbs

Meet Nixie, a wearable camera concept that flies off your wrist and turns into a remote-controlled quadcopter. It’s the bizarre-yet-appealing wearable camera drone nobody asked for… and now I kind of want it. Intel is holding a competition to encourage new wearable technology ideas, and the Nixie is one of the finalists. So far, it’s still in development, so the flying wristlet camera is rough around the edges.

Team captain Christoph Kohstall eventually wants you to be able to send the the Nixie flying with a gesture. It would recognize where you’re standing, snap a picture, then return to the wrist, like a futuristic paparazzi boomerang.

If sticking your arm out to capture photos makes you feel like a lo-tech peasant, you’re probably Nixie’s target demographic.

All of that seems to be a long way off still; they’re going to have to make the Nixie extremely consistent to make it worthwhile. After all, getting one of those GoPro stick mounts to take a farther-away shot might not be as convenient of simply flinging a camera off your wrist, but it’s also a lot less complicated. In a crowded area, I’d guess it’d be hard for the Nixie to tell which person it was meant to fly back towards.

The Nixie team has a lot of work to do, but if they can polish their prototype, this is a weird wearable worth watching. [The Creator’s Project]