JoLLy 2

You are in the neighborhood park for a Sunday evening stroll. Families sit around picnic baskets, kids run around, guys play a game of touch football, and the health conscious are out for a jog.

Your eyes catch an orange object flying in the setting sky. The object traces an oblique trajectory and falls to the ground. An athletic looking man runs towards the fallen object and picks it up. He then checks his mobile phone, cracks a smile, and runs back a couple of meters.

The man tosses the object up in the air again and repeats the previous exercise. You are very curious now and want to check what’s going on. You edge closer to the man and try to peer over his shoulders. This is what you see: aerial photos of the park appear on the mobile screen at different time-intervals. And that is when you figure the whole thing out.

The orange object being thrown about is actually a camera that takes pictures and sends it back to your mobile phone. The phone receives the pictures via a Bluetooth transmitter. This flying camera is a concept design by Turkish designer Hakan Bogazpinar and is titled ‘Flee’.

There are cameras that can be bounced and cameras that can be lobbed ahead for surveillance. The Flee takes the concept of throw-able cameras to a ‘higher’ level. The Flee has two components: a digital camera and a Bluetooth receiver. Flee’s digital camera is a circular container that is enclosed in a round, lightweight ball made up of a crack resistant material. The ball is orange in color.

The circular digital camera is made up of a lithium battery, memory chip, Bluetooth chip, a CCD, and the lens. The orange ball camera is attached to an intelligent tail design that keeps the camera in an upright position while in flight. The tail design resembles that of a table fan.

The Bluetooth receiver unit will be plugged in your mobile phone and will decode and store images. Using the throwable ball camera is as easy as playing catch. Hold the ball in your hand and toss it as high as you can. Once the ball is an upright position it will start clicking pictures at specific time intervals and, as mentioned above, transmit it to your mobile device via the Bluetooth transmitter.

Think of all the fun pictures you can click from an angle that is not possible with the current lot of digital cameras. The Flee is in a concept stage and has not been developed into a practical reality as yet.