My first trial with the video sunglasses involved just leaving the apartment with my son to go play in the park across the street. The second trial is wearing the video sunglasses during our game of football.
Video sunglasses, Trial 2: playing football from Bregtje van der Haak on Vimeo.
There are some positives and many negatives to report.
Negative – Some of the problems I encountered:
– The video sunglasses record sound and image, but the sound runs out of sync with the video image. So if you want to use both, you have to sync it manually. That’s a lot of work.
– There is no way to know exactly what I’m filming, because there is no viewfinder. I can only roughly guess the angle.
– The controls for starting and stopping video recording don’t work very well and, as a result, I had no clear idea of when I was filming. Also, there is no visible indicator that shows you’re recording when youre wearing the glasses. Sometimes, when I start recording, a woman’s voice will say:’You are recording now’, through the ear phones, but it’s not consistent.
– The camera comes with a remote control, which is convenient, but not very reliable.
– My hair blows in front of the lens, so it needs to be tied back.
– Any movement of the head is not well taken by the camera and produces a shaky, interrupted image. I had no idea my head was moving so much, until I saw these images.
– The video sunglasses also include an mp3-player and a photo camera, but this only confuses the issue and diminishes user-friendliness. I would have preferred just one option: VIDEO, but better.
– short shots (2 minutes) work technically better than long takes. After a few minutes, the camera starts to behave strangely, although it supposedly supports 2 hours of continuous recording, stored on 8GB built-in memory.
Positive – On the bright side:
– No one notices the glasses when you walk into a shop or a restaurant. I could really blend in without anyone asking any questions. This is appealing for spies, I guess.
– It is possible to record reasonable video in very small and badly lit places, for example in a dressing room.
– Both audio and video are pretty good quality: video resolution is 736×576@30fps, AVI format and fine for posting on websites.
– In low light, at the end of the day, the image obtains a wonderful, grainy, cinematic quality, which reminds me of 16mm. I shot a Nan Lian Garden and although my movements are crap, the image is mysteriously beautiful. I love the colors.
– Especially without sound, the point-of-view (POV) shooting can obtain a poetic quality. I imagine it could work wonderfully well as short segments in a larger HD documentary, representing a particular – subjective, poetic – POV of one of the characters, with music.
Conclusion – Summarizing my first experiences with the video sunglasses, I am disappointed by the lack of control I have over the recorded image. The a-sync sound is also a major problem, because it means editing is required for sharing a simple video, including blog posts and web video galleries. I will continue to experiment with the glasses though, because I love the POV capacity and I am pretty sure the user-friendliness and resolution of video glasses will be improved very soon.
As it is now, I would never rely on this camera for crucial scenes in a documentary. I would only use it for filming in highly secretive and otherwise inaccessible places, which brings along all kinds of ethical questions, which I will not go into right now. Filming secretively is not really my thing anyway. I would like to use video glasses to record a particular point-of-view or to avoid interrupting reality with heavy equipment and a camera crew, but not to hide the fact that I am filming.
Soon, I will do a try-out with the MUVI camera attached to my forehead, and play football again, for comparison.
Being there 