Nikon Heartography Kit Sends Snapshot Control to the Dogs

Just when you assumed they’d thought of everything, along comes Nikon to remind you that there’s always room for advancement where creativity is concerned. In an epic one-uppance of GoPro’s Fetch harness, which allows you to chronicle your four-legged bestie’s exploits, Nikon has developed a technology that uses heart rate to trigger a camera’s shutter – thus making it possible to strap a camera to your dog’s chest and have it snap selective photos of the things that ring Fido’s bell.

The method is called Heartography, and uses an elastic heart monitoring band to send a Bluetooth signal to a camera attached within a SmartCase. The mount includes an OLED display that shows the canine wearer’s baseline heart rate. When that rate is elevated, a servo arm presses the camera shutter. The result is a series of straight-from-the-heart snapshots.

 

Nikon’s test device fits a Coolpix L31 shooter into the SmartCase, but before you hit the interwebs in search of your very own pup-parazzi pic kit, bear in mind that this appears to be more of a gimmicky campaign than an actual consumer product announcement. There’s no word from Nikon on the eventual availability of the Heartography SmartCase, and the only associated product currently on the market is the aforementioned L31 itself.