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If you’re a cycler or runner who likes to record your activity, you might have hours and hours of footage that you’ve never gotten a chance to edit down. That’s exactly what Graava was designed to avoid.
Graava is a small, helmet-mountable video camera meant to take all the legwork out of making memories. Or is it making videos? The designers of Graava don’t want there to be a difference. “What if there was a camera that could make memories just like your brain does?” ponders a bearded, vaguely hip man in the video explaining Graava.
Graava tracks things like motion, sound, and position with five sensors—a camera, microphone, accelerometer, GPS, and optional user-worn heart rate monitor. By combining data from these inputs, the camera takes the most fast-moving, heart-pounding moments of your footage and edits them together. It sorts excitement based on the user’s heart rate, when a big object moved through the frame of the video, or if there was a loud noise.
The camera isn’t loaded up with the latest specs—only reaching 1080p video at 30 frames per second—but the camera’s software is what sets it apart from a GoPro or Sony Action Cams. However, Graava does have a 4K hyperlapse mode. The Graava can charge by being placed on a wireless, inductive charging stand, and used as a remote camera for the home when not being used as an adventuring tool. When connected to the charging stand, the camera also automatically backs all your raw footage up to the cloud, and goes about editing any footage you haven’t seen yet.
For recording, you can also connect the camera to third-party heart rate monitors via Bluetooth. The 1100mAh battery should last for three hours while recording 1080p video, according to the manufacturers, although that’s with the Wi-Fi turned off.
The free Graava app, available on iPhone and Android, allows users to edit their video down to specific times, sync the video to music, and share directly to social media on the go.
The idea for Graava was born when creator Bruno Gregory was hit by a car. He even added a link to the site, so you could see it happen. (The Graava site claims the driver was put in jail following the collision.) He thought that there had to be some better way to integrate machine learning into a camera for easier editing.
But auto-editing isn’t new. The TomTom Bandit has a strange “shake-to-edit” feature which does a similar job (and shoots in 4K), and even Disney Research published a paper on automatic editing last year. GoPro also has an easy tagging feature called HiLight Tag. That means Graava is already behind the curve, because the camera won’t release until early 2016. However, the preorder price of $250 dollars is appealing, as Graava will retail for $400 dollars upon release. In 2013, Google added automatic editing to their Google+ platform.
