Hobby project, Fall 2024 @ HOME
Pulling out a regular camera at a party is no fun, whether it’s a phone or a standalone camera. It’s inherently a lonely experience, separating the photographer from the subjects, and having the former fiddle with the device in order to get the angle and settings and everything proper. There’s also the risk with smartphones of instant sharing without the subjects’ consent. If you extend all that to moving pictures, it gets further complicated. Still, pictures and videos can store important memories for us, and so simply concluding that cameras don’t belong in social gatherings does not feel satisfactory.
To address these issues, and create an installation while at it, I created HappyTRGR, a video camera system so easy to use and inherently social that it’s impossible not to get trigger-happy (with the trigger button that activates the recording, thankfully).
System setup
So simple, yet so complicated to actually get working. If I continue working on the project this might change, but for now the Pi is running OS Lite and pushing the files to a local network server after each recording, where a second (third?) computer is looking for the newest file to play back - for example on a projector, so that the entire rest of the party can see. It’s also a hack to create a great video wall, with colors guaranteed to match the rest of the venue.
Smooth interactions
The most important thing to ensure use, after people are convinced that it’s actually useful/fun/otherwise desirable to use the device, is to make the interactions friction free, simple, understandable and seamless. Here, this was achieved by giving the technical interface only two possible interactions, where only one of them - the trigger - was actually necessary. The other one was focus, but because of the small sensor size, wide angle and little variance in subject distance indoors, that could just be left at “moderately far”.
During testing, this was fun and easy enough for anyone to pick it up, film a little bit and marvel at their creation on the big screen - before someone else did the same right after.