A lot of the time spent making sweet videos of stuff like skydiving, snowboarding and anything generally considered to be an extreme sport is actually spent doing everything but the sport itself.
There's the transferring of the video to somewhere you can edit it, the editing itself and there's the uploading once you've edited the footage. It's a hassle that most folks would probably prefer to just skip. The Sioeye Iris4G is an action camera that aims to solve these problems.
The Sioeye Iris4G specifically wants to circumvent all of the previously-described rigamarole by cutting out the middleman and streaming directly to viewers. Once on, it can send out alerts via social media to get people watching as the action goes down in real-time. This, of course, presents a brand new spectrum of problems anyone looking to actually use the thing must take into account. The real-time streaming is currently attached to "a micro-SIM with an active data plan" — meaning that users will have to go through wireless carriers like T-Mobile and AT&T for it to work in this way.
In terms of technical details, the Sioeye Iris4G runs Android 4.4 KitKat on an octa-core CPU of unclear origin. The camera itself comes with an adjustable 150-degree field of view, 480p livestreaming with optional simultaneous 1080p local recording and an even better range of resolutions and frame rates for regular recording from 4K at 30fps to 480p at 30fps. It also comes with built-in gyro and magnetic sensors, barometer and GPS, all of which can feed data to the streaming experience so that viewers get a fuller picture of exactly what's happening in the real-time video they're watching.
As with any hardware company that's turned to a Kickstarter campaign for its very first product, this is all tentative. In the section of the project where it discusses the risks and challenges inherent to it, it certainly seems like it's taken all the necessary precautions, like partnering with a major manufacturer to produce test batches of the camera and submitting to the many hoops required by wireless carriers, like FCC testing.
The Sioeye Iris4G is currently scheduled to land in March 2016 with an expected MSRP of $499. More information about the camera and the team behind it is available on its website.
Source: PRNewswire
