Android By Russell Holly Jul. 11, 2014 4:27 pm
Smartwatches are a relatively niche market still, with users and developers still trying to figure out what is useful on a tiny wrist computer and what isn’t. One tool that has been around since the early smartwatch days has been the ability to take photos on your phone by using your connected watch as a remote. Google has now included this feature into Android Wear, and in doing so has enabled a new generation of users to explore this functionality.
It’s hard to imagine a lot of benevolent reasons for remotely triggering the camera on your smartphone. If you have your phone on a tripod and are taking a family photo, having the ability to tap a button on your watch to remotely trigger the shutter could be cool. It’s hard to image much else in the way of a tangible benefit unless your goal is to take photos without everyone being aware of what you are doing. The way Google has enabled this feature, as soon as you open the Google Camera app on your phone there’s a prompt on your watch to access the remote control. You can either dismiss the notification or open the remote app, which is just a single button that activates a three second countdown to take a photo. Once the photo has been taken, it pops up on your watch so you can see what you grabbed.
This was taken from 16 feet away, through three walls.
On the one hand, it’s good that Google doesn’t allow you to open the camera app from the watch. You also don’t get a live feed of the viewfinder like you could with the Sony Smartwatch. You can’t use this to record video, either. In order to use this with surveillance in mind, you’d have to set the phone up somewhere with the camera app already on, which means it would have to be positioned somewhere that isn’t totally obvious. You can dim the screen on most phones to the point of looking nearly off, so depending on your environment it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to obfuscate what is happening on the phone, but you’d have to be deliberately doing something bad in order to get what you want from this experience.
The second part of this equation is the remote shutter, which is accessible as long as the camera app is open and the watch has a Bluetooth connection to the phone. In testing the LG G Watch, I found that I could take photos from well over 15 feet away and get the image on my watch instantly. As long as you have a stable connection, it works just fine even through walls.
In the end, this particular Android Wear feature is probably not a big deal. The potential for abuse with this sort of thing is fairly high, but the simplicity of this Android Wear extension limits this a great deal. This app certainly makes it easy to be covert about taking photos you don’t want to be caught taking, but after using it there’s something to be said for the potential to be a lot worse. A third party developer could easily design a camera app with a more feature complete Android Wear extension and make a lot of noise for themselves in the process, but such an app would never have the kind of reach the Google’s Camera app has, especially after moving to the Play Store and being available to most Android phones on the market.
More...
It’s hard to imagine a lot of benevolent reasons for remotely triggering the camera on your smartphone. If you have your phone on a tripod and are taking a family photo, having the ability to tap a button on your watch to remotely trigger the shutter could be cool. It’s hard to image much else in the way of a tangible benefit unless your goal is to take photos without everyone being aware of what you are doing. The way Google has enabled this feature, as soon as you open the Google Camera app on your phone there’s a prompt on your watch to access the remote control. You can either dismiss the notification or open the remote app, which is just a single button that activates a three second countdown to take a photo. Once the photo has been taken, it pops up on your watch so you can see what you grabbed.
This was taken from 16 feet away, through three walls.On the one hand, it’s good that Google doesn’t allow you to open the camera app from the watch. You also don’t get a live feed of the viewfinder like you could with the Sony Smartwatch. You can’t use this to record video, either. In order to use this with surveillance in mind, you’d have to set the phone up somewhere with the camera app already on, which means it would have to be positioned somewhere that isn’t totally obvious. You can dim the screen on most phones to the point of looking nearly off, so depending on your environment it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to obfuscate what is happening on the phone, but you’d have to be deliberately doing something bad in order to get what you want from this experience.
The second part of this equation is the remote shutter, which is accessible as long as the camera app is open and the watch has a Bluetooth connection to the phone. In testing the LG G Watch, I found that I could take photos from well over 15 feet away and get the image on my watch instantly. As long as you have a stable connection, it works just fine even through walls.
In the end, this particular Android Wear feature is probably not a big deal. The potential for abuse with this sort of thing is fairly high, but the simplicity of this Android Wear extension limits this a great deal. This app certainly makes it easy to be covert about taking photos you don’t want to be caught taking, but after using it there’s something to be said for the potential to be a lot worse. A third party developer could easily design a camera app with a more feature complete Android Wear extension and make a lot of noise for themselves in the process, but such an app would never have the kind of reach the Google’s Camera app has, especially after moving to the Play Store and being available to most Android phones on the market.
More...
