Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? No, it’s Just Another Nixie
BY: ABDALLAH ABDELDAYEM
@AMABDELDAYEM
Keeping up with the speed of technology and the new innovative tools it produces is proving more difficult than ever.
But the high-tech market has yet to impress with its latest invention, Nixie.
Nixie is a small camera capable of flying off the user’s wrist, take a picture or video of the user from the air and manage to fly back into the user’s hands.
It can capture images in High Definition (HD) at angles one couldn’t normally reach whilst using an Edison chip to track the user.
Nixie is the $500,000 winner of the 2014 Make It Wearable Challenge (MIW) sponsored by Intel – one of the largest semiconductor chip manufacturing companies in the world – was developed by Christoph Kohstall, a former postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, and Jelena Jovanovic,a former tech lead and manager at Google.
At first, such an invention seems futuristic, but when taking a step back and analyzing its many uses, one might reconsider.
“Well I think you need to stand back and take it into context,” Ronnie Close, assistant professor of photography at AUC, told The Caravan.
“[The] drone technology comes from military research and such camera devices have been in use by them for a long time now,”
Drones have only recently started to be a major tech item with appeal due to their accessibility and easy portable designs.
The word ‘drone’ usually equates to surveillance issues in people’s minds.
Who wants little cameras flying around with the ability to capture a picture at a moment’s notice?
Close believes that these images evoke questions of ethics and morality; the entire right to privacy is thrown into jeopardy as a result of the potential of drones.
“In this debate I am reminded of the writer Susan Sontag who wrote in her book titled ‘On Photography’ that in advanced industrial societies photography falls into two uses and categories, one the spectacle of entertainment and secondly in surveillance. Maybe public use of drones is a fusion of both,” Close added.
However, Nixie could be just another stepping stone toward further advancements in technology.
Professional drone photographer Mohamed Abdel Razek told The Caravan that he believed aerial cinematography through drones is already making a huge revolution, and that drones are stretching the limits of photography.
“Nixie is a type of drone from the future; yet it’s a hobby-grade one that is friendly to use by people who don’t know how to fly a professional drone,” said Abdel Razek, a former Caravaner who is holding an exhibition of aerial footage at the Photographic Gallery.
This makes it much more accessible to those who do not possess the necessary technical skills to manage drone photography.
Nixie’s success is associated with the vast use of social media.
According to Business Insider, over 350 million Facebook photos are uploaded on a daily Nixie can fly right back into your palm [Courtesy of flynixie] TECH basis in 2013, and if anything this number could be exponentially larger today.
The question that stands now, is whether Nixie and its duplicates are a step towards a better future, or a more insecure world.
“Drones are regulated in many countries, and I hope the time comes in Egypt,” Abdel Razek said.
In Islamabad for example, drones are used as aerial bomb carriers, with the capability of carrying up to 1 kilogram of explosives. As a result, the authorities in Islamabad have banned the flight of drone cameras, according to the Pakistan Daily Times.
“We may get some interesting new perspectives on the world but it always comes down to the same dilemmas of who and how someone uses the camera, and what they point it at,” Close said.
Despite being a prototype, the implications of Nixie will soon be within the world’s view.
Whether it’s a stride towards a marvelous future, or a disastrous one, is something we will all have to witness. Nixie is just a brief glimpse of what the future might look like.
