It’s the sort of thing you might expect from a movie about a smart building that kills people (there is at least one and it wasn’t even made by the Sharknado folks). Ring, they of the smart doorbells and cameras, have announced the Always Home Cam, a smart camera that’ll fly around your house to see what’s going on when you’re not there.
Droning on
Part drone, part IP camera, the Always Home Cam works in a few ways. When it’s first unpacked, you can map your home and send it commands to check a certain room on demand. Or it can be set to check out locations where a Ring alert has taken place automatically, without human intervention. The main examples being given for its use are to make sure you didn’t leave the stove on, or something equally innocuous. But we’re all thinking about surprising burglars with our little flying assistant at this point.
It doesn’t record when it’s not flying (the dock obscures the camera sensor) and it makes a noise while in flight, so you should be able to keep anything too embarrassing off-camera. We’d imagine the first burglar to be surprised by one of these is in for a nasty shock regardless. We’d love to see that video, and the magic of the internet means we almost certainly will. That and a whole host of other videos of whacky stuff the Always Home Cam has preserved for posterity.
Ring’s Aways Home Cam launches in the States in 2021, with pricing pegged at about $250 (R4,300) when it launches in home around that country. Hopefully it works as advertised and actually launches on time, but it’s… ambitious. And just a Taser-mod away from being a nasty little crowd-control device.
Source: The Verge