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CamBall Smallest Personal Camcorder
The Camball is being touted as the "world's smallest personal camcorder" and maybe it is, being just about the size of a ping pong ball. The Camball shoots 320 x 240 video at 25 frames per second, recording sound with its built-in mic.
The device also features motion detection, for surveillance.
(Camball personal camcorder)
Robert Silverberg had a very similar idea in his 1969 novel The Man in the Maze; he called it a "recording eye" and put it to use spying on aliens:
Muller saw a cloud-wrapped planet... it could have been Venus... The recording eye pierced the cloud layer and revealed an unfamiliar, not very Earthlike planet. The soil looked moist and spongy, and rubbery trees that looked like giant toadstools thrust upward from it......three alien figures came strolling through the somber grove. They were elongated, almost spidery, with clusters of eight or ten jointed limbs depending from their narrow shoulders...
One of them paused, bent peered closely at the ground. It scooped up the eye that had been witnessing its activities. The image grew chaotic; Muller guessed that the eye was being passed from hand to hand...
Boardman said, "That was taken less than a month ago. We parked a drone ship fifty thousand kilometers up and dropped roughly a thousand eyes on Beta Hydri IV. At least half went straight to the bottom of the ocean... This was the only one that actually showed us a clear view of the aliens."
(Read more about Silverberg's recording eyes)
Via Gearlog.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/22/2010)
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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