If you’re tired of your home security cameras not providing quite enough protection, then a Slovenian startup could soon offer something a bit more violent. The new security camera is called PaintCam, and it’s essentially an AI-powered security camera that doubles as a paintball gun to help scare off would-be intruders – or just people that it doesn’t recognize.
If the idea sounds absolutely crazy, then yeah, you’re not alone in that line of thinking. The device is set to appear on Kickstarter this month, and according to the website, it will offer face recognition, automatic target marking, and AI-based decision-making to help identify unfamiliar visitors that mosey up to your home.
PaintCam Eve, as the actual device is being called, has a very unassuming name, sure. But, when it finds someone that it doesn’t recognize and they don’t abide by the warnings that it issues, the camera actually pelts them with paintballs. Whether or not that’s enough to scare someone off from robbing your home is completely up to the thief in question. But it should at least help make them easier to identify, I guess.
But the thing that really makes this smart camera so bonkers is the fact that the company also plans to offer tear gas projectiles instead of paintballs. Yeah, you heard that right. This AI-powered smart security camera will actually be able to hurl tear gas projectiles at incoming intruders, the mailman, or whoever else it feels shouldn’t be walking on your lawn.
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PaintCam will also give you full control of deciding who gets peppered with paintballs, thanks to an alert system designed to let you know when it spots someone it doesn’t recognize. The company also says that some versions of the system will be able to identify pets, though exactly how reliable that will be, or if it will shoot any strays that wander into your yard remains to be seen.
As I said before, the camera launches on Kickstarter this month, where the company no doubt hopes to garner more interest and see just how many people want a camera system like this. No real specs have been shared for the PaintCam, though it will likely come with the usual home security smorgasbord of live monitoring, object tracking, night vision, and movement detection.
There are also a lot of questions about just how liable the owners of this particular smart camera might be if, say, the paintballs or tear gas projectiles were to cause serious harm to someone. But I suppose that’s a question that PaintCam will need to find a way to answer.