And the gold medal for swimming goes to….Garrett Brown
The Mobycam gives us a swimmer's-eye-view of what's happening under the water's surface
When did Olympics men’s swimming become porn for girls? Some might say in 1928, when Johnny Weissmuller was America’s favorite pool boy. Others might argue in 1972, when Mark Spitz showed that wetter is better.
It’s not that I am oblivious to the pleasures of masculine musculature. Yet as my stepdaughter, Morgan, admired Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps while we watched the Olympics, I ogled the Mobycam, inventor Garrett Brown’s submersible camera mounted at the bottom of the Olympics pool. NBC commissioned the camera for the 1992 Barcelona Oympics. By giving the folks at home a swimmer’s-eye-view of what goes on underneath the water’s surface the Mobycam has added considerable visual excitement aquatic events. And his Divecam has done same by plunging with the divers during the springboard competitions. Frankly, I wasn’t interested in aquatic events until Brown’s inventions made me understand what I was seeing.
Brown, the Eadweard Muybridge of the 21st century, is a practiced hand at creating cameras that reveal human movement. (His Steadicam liberated the movie camera from tracks and dollies and made the movies navigate space like a human instead of a machine.) Let’s give a gold medal for swimming to that unsung Olympian, the Mobycam.
How does a camera’s ability to capture previously unseen angles enhance your Olympics experience?
You did not entirely disregard those glistening torsos.
Indeed they continue to glisten and move gracefully and miraculously…. who would give up this angle of view?
Dept of Women-of-a-Certain-Age: As the television screen showed the swimming events, looking up at the powerful eels-with-arms, I too fixated on one thing: What a cool camera.
[…] to give a truly unique view from below (see a funny tribute to Mobycam’s recent coverage here). His Divecam — a device he developed at the request of NBC — followed divers right […]
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