Heartography
Product development for Nikon that enables dogs to take photographs with their hearts
It feels great when you look at something and then you realise an idea is there for the taking, and feel almost stupid for not seeing it before. That’s exactly what happened with Heartography.
I was staring at the logo when I wondered: if Nikon was at the heart of the image, what would an image look like if it was taken from the heart, literally?
The thought was to use the heart as the finger to the camera’s shutter release, using emotions to place the heart, at the heart of the Nikon image.
Similar to how a lie detectors work, we can calibrate for a base heart rate in an individual and track deviations from there, each segmental increment corresponding to an emotion.
The heart sees what is invisible to the eye
The cat was a prime candidate. Aloof, distant and almost uncaring (to me at least), it seemed to be the perfect candidate for the project. We approached a tech builder to help us build a prototype. Born from Polar running monitors and hacked with a custom Bluetooth chip, we tried to place it on a cat.
If you’ve ever tried to place a polar running belt on a cat, you would probably realise it isn’t a good idea.
One terrified cat and several afternoons later, we also realised the cat’s heart rate averages at double a human’s, so our adapted Polar monitor wouldn’t be able to pick up on signals properly.
Back to the drawing board, kind of
Since the cat situation wasn’t optimal, we had to change our specimen. We decided on a dog since it was large enough to hold Nikon’s lightest camera in a custom mounted shell, as well as a lower heart rate that we could use with the heart monitoring device.
Ready the paws
We finally had a working prototype out that could be mounted on a canine as easily as a human. Our main challenge in this phase was searching for skin contact to get a continuous reading of the heart, which we fixed with a little simulated perspiration – water!
After letting Grizzler out on his photo walkabouts, we showcased the world’s first dog photographer’s photographs and created a video showing how we created Heartography, and of course, Grizzler going about on his photowalks.
The video did pretty well on the internet, but I suspect this campaign would have been a bigger success with a cat.
Featured on:
What I would have done differently
Have a cat featured instead! I think it would have done a bit better with the idea, but from that experience I learnt to roll with changes because sometimes what you thought to be the best, just simply doesn’t work.
While the actual product innovation saw the creative team work very closely with the engineer, I feel we could have engaged even more specialised people, such as veterinarians, cardiologists, psychologists, product designers and engineers to create a more stunning piece of work, to really land the campaign in the crosshairs of creativity, engineering and data.
Client
Nikon
Agency
JWT Singapore
Chief Creative Officer
Valerie Cheng
Art Director
Jared Kang
Writer
Alexander Lim
Technologist
David Teo
