There’s a common reaction when people first see Polaroid’s new action camera: “Most people say it’s cute,” says Robert Brunner, the founder and president of Ammunition, the design firm responsible for the Beats by Dre headphones. Normally, “cute” would be considered the sort of vague, dashed-off descriptor that designers hate to hear, on par with “neat” or “cool.” In this case, though, cute was as good of a reaction as Brunner and Polaroid could have hoped for. “We wanted to position the product to really be fun and accessible and easy and simple, not intimidating,” he says. “Thats why when people say it’s cute, I’m happy.”
With the Cube, Polaroid is entering into a crowded market. GoPro has already established itself as the reigning action cam for a very specific type of person; namely, adrenaline junkies who jump out of planes for fun.
But Polaroid CEO Scott Hardy believes there’s a whole untapped market of camera users who would rather film their flight from inside a plane than outside of one. “From our perspective, we felt like we really needed to grow the overall pie,” says Hardy. “When we talked to Ammunition, we were very specific. We said to them, 'We need something that’s unique and differentiated that addresses a much broader demographic.'”
Polaroid’s customers skew female--about 70 percent--- and they sit on either side of an increasingly large age gap. There’s the old-school Polaroid lovers from the company's heyday. Then there are the youngin's who tote around the instant film to document BBQs and wild nights out. Cube is aimed squarely at the latter.
This insight---that there’s a market for a camera that captures more casual action---was the driving idea behind Ammunition’s design. The cube sits at a serendipitous 35 millimeters all around; it feels at home in your hand, the way a pair of dice nestle nicely into your palm. Its edges are softly rounded, and if you look closely each of the sides is slightly rounded too---an attempt to add structural integrity to what’s essentially a cube of glass and electronics.
It’s an unconventional form factor for a camera, which is a risk when you look at the backlash towards other adventurous camera designs like Lytro’s first light field camera. “We really felt it was extremely important for us to do something entirely unique,” says Brunner. “It’s an interesting time to be a designer. We’re going back and redesigning all kinds of stuff we never thought we would...there’s this line you have to walk because people understand certain things.” Gregoire Vandenbussche, a senior designer at Ammunition, who worked on the cube, says his main inspiration was the old-school pink erasers we used during school. “When you use it, it kind of wears down and it’s very friendly, and you like to hold it in your hand and fidget with it," he explains. "We wanted that sort of quality to it."
This benefit of this softness is two-fold: First, the cube feels warm and personal, like a tiny gadget you feel a pet-like affinity towards. It’s also protective. The camera has respectable guts; it’s not a GoPro, but it takes high-quality video at 720p or 1080p resolution with a wide angle lens that’s slightly recessed into the cube for protection. To switch back and forth, you unscrew a little door in the back; that’s also where you insert your SD card. You press the big button on top once to take a still image, twice for a video. It’s easy to balance the Cube between two fingers, or snap it onto something metallic using the magnet at the bottom (there's also a line of accessories).To view your photos and footage, you plug the camera into your computer via a micro USB.
It’s exceedingly simple to use. Or at least simple enough that if you hand it around at a party, your friends would quickly gather how it works. Which is the entire point. The Cube's photos might not come with the built-in gauzy filter of photos from yesteryear, but if Polaroid has its way, it just might become the instant film of the 21st century.
