Forget selfie sticks. The future is (almost) here, and it’s (probably) bringing a wearable drone that will snap your photos for you.
The drone clasps around the wearer’s wrist like a bracelet. When a photo op presents itself, the wearer would release the drone with a flick of the wrist. The drone would then fly up, take a picture, and return to the wearer, who would catch it and reattach it to the wrist.
The product, called Nixie, is still in development. It’s one of 10 finalists in Intel’s “make it wearable” competition, which means the creators—led by Stanford physics researcher Christoph Kohstall—secured $50,000 and guidance from Intel to see it through. The competition’s winner will receive $500,000 in November.
Floris Ernst, a robotics scientist on the Nixie team, tells Quartz that the developers want the product to be intuitive, so the more power you put into the release, the farther it would go.
If the Nixie takes the top Intel prize, Ernst says, the product ideally would be released within the next year and retail for less than $1,000.
“We want to enable people to stay in the flow” and not interrupt what they’re doing when they want to capture a moment, Ernst says.