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This flying mini-drone could be your future lifecasting pet robot

This flying mini-drone could be your future lifecasting pet robot

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MeCam
MeCam

Once you've gotten good at cutting together banal, 6-second clips of your daily activities with Vine, the next step should be obvious: get a pet flying robot to follow you around and record everything you do.

That's one possible future for Always Innovating's MeCam, a pint-sized quadrocopter which hopes to one day become your flying robot familiar. The tiny drone responds to voice commands and streams video to nearby Android or iOS devices, but probably won't be sneaking through any bedroom windows, as its build quality seems to lack compared to GRASP Lab's ultra-manouverable quadrocopter swarms. That leaves it as a kind of personal sousveillance accessory akin to cyborg discrimination victim Steve Mann's skull-mounted camera — or even the meticulous self-surveillance of Hasan Elahi, the media artist who has been recording and uploading his everyday life ever since being interrogated by the FBI in 2002.

The company behind MeCam has no plans to sell the drones itself, but says it's looking to license the design out to other companies on the cheap as early as 2014.