Nixie is a wearable camera that turns into a quadcopter

Nixie is one of the 10 finalists of Intel’s “Make It Wearable” competition and it consists of a quadcopter drone that attaches to your wrist and flies off your hand to capture a selfie at your command.

Three of the coolest things in today’s world are selfies, drones, and wearables. Nixie has decided to use this trio in order to assemble a device that could spark a new revolution in the gadget world.

This device includes a camera and can be mounted on a person’s wrist. When it detects a special gesture, Nixie will fly off the wearer’s wrist, snap a photo, and then get back to the person’s wrist. Sound cool? Well, Intel certainly thought that it was impressive, so it added it to the 10 finalists of the “Make It Wearable” contest, that offers total prizes of $1,000,000.

Nixie is a wearable camera that will turn into a quadcopter that captures selfies.

Nixie, the wearable quadcopter camera, makes it to the final of Intel’s “Make It Wearable” contest

At the beginning of 2014, Intel opened up the “Make It Wearable” competition. “Chipzilla” has revealed that 10 finalists will be chosen, each receiving $50,000 in funding to complete their projects.

Recently, the winners have been announced and Nixie has been one of them. The team led by Christoph Kohstall, a Stanford researcher, has qualified in the final by introducing a wearable camera that is also a quadcopter.

This camera attaches to your hand like a wrist band, but automatically turns into an aerial drone. The device will take a selfie, then it will return on your wrist.

The device is prototype phase, but the Nixie team is getting loads of help from Intel

Nixie is still in development. However, the team is receiving help from Intel employees. The help consists of mentors, tech support, and even design ideas.

Nevertheless, the Nixie team is not too shabby, as it includes Michael Niedermayr (a film maker who takes care of flight control aspects), Steven Le (a former Google engineer), and Jelena Jovanovic (Technical Program Manager at Google).

The rest of the team consists of Floris Ernst, Kris Winer, and Stefan Niedermayr, who will try to turn Nixie into a reality and an awesome product.

Winning Intel’s competition would put $500,000 into Nixie’s account

A working prototype has been demoed by the team and it is visible that this idea needs a lot of work, especially in the design area. It is not easy to design a watch-like camera which turns itself into a quadcopter, so we can only hope that Nixie will eventually manage to become a consumer’s product.

Nixie could be used to capture regular photos and videos, too, so it is not simply aimed at selfie fanatics. The grand winner will be revealed soon and will receive an extra $500,000 prize. We’ll keep an eye on this contest and Nixie, so stay tuned!