More of this Feature • History • Watch in Actions • Overcoming Difficulties

A key inventive concept is the incidentalist image capture. (See for example, CA 2275798.) Incidentalist image capture is image capture that appears to be occurring merely by chance or without intention or calculation. An important aspect of the incidentalist camera is a concomitant cover activity.

Unlike science fiction's vision of how a wristwatch videophone might work, the camera points ahead, rather than up at the user. In this way, the wristwatch captures video of what the wearer is looking at, rather than merely a picture of the wearer. Thus taking a picture or shooting some video may be masked by a concomitant cover activity.

Traditional photography and video capture, even if the camera is very small, attracts considerable attention on account of the gesture of bringing the camera up to the eye. Even if the size of the camera could be reduced to the point of being negligible (e.g. no bigger than the eyecup of a typical camera viewfinder, for example), the very gesture of bringing a device up to the eye is unnatural and attracts considerable attention, especially in establishments such as department stores where photography is often prohibited. However it is in these very establishments in which a customer may wish, for example, to have a video record of the clerk's statement of the refund policy or the terms of a sale. Just as department stores often keep a video recording of all transactions (and often even a video recording of all activity within the establishment, sometimes including a video recording of customers in the department store fitting rooms or changerooms), the goal of the present invention is to assist, for example, a customer who may wish to keep a video record of a transaction, interaction with a clerk, manager, refund explanation, or the like, or at the very least, a system that enables the customer to capture a picture of an official who refuses to identify himself/herself.

The basic principle of the invention is that a camera is concealed in a device that has another purpose, where the other purpose of the device involves looking at a display. This other non--picture--taking purpose of the device provides for a concomitant cover activity. Because the camera and viewfinder (XF86 screen) are concealed in a wristwatch, when the user wishes to take a picture, he or she merely pretends to check the time on the wristwatch. Checking the time is a concomitant cover activity. The camera is mounted in the watch in such a way that it points out in front of the user, so that a person the user is talking to will be in field of view of the camera while the user is pretending to check the time. Moreover, the user can pretend he/she has trouble focusing on the watch (as when a person who would normally wear bifocals has forgotten his/her eyeglasses) and hold the watch some distance out from the eyes, so that it will be very close to the clerk or official that the user is taking a picture of. This may be useful to capture close up pictures of identifying features of the official.

The concomitant cover activity may also involve something as simple as resting the arm on a counter top, while wearing the GNUX wristwatch. The resting of the arm on the countertop is also a concomitant cover activity for taking stabilized videoorbits high resolution still pictures.

The wristcam is a borderline case between a real wearable computer and a handheld device.

Wearable Computers versus handheld devices

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