‘High five camera’ celebrates California artist’s favourite greeting

Andrew Maxwell-Parish, aka Electric Slim, isn't a fan of handshakes.

"It's a gesture with no soul and reeks of a corporate entity. Why must we limit ourselves to this one boring interaction? Of all the split second human gestures we could do, it's the lamest. Even the handshake has so many different variations, yet we choose the same boring one every time," he wrote. "Why not a fist bump, shoulder tap, giving skin, the hungry chicken, or my personal favourite, the high five."

To celebrate the high five, Maxwell-Parish, who runs Hybrid Lab, a creative technology lab at the California College of the Arts, created the high five camera to "take short video clips of the high fives I gave strangers."

"Another ridiculous contraption that will hopefully extend an appreciation of the mighty high five. The quickest and most universal gesture for telling someone, 'you are awesome,'" Maxwell-Parish wrote.

Using thrift store objects and a GoPro camera, he built the high five camera with a Wi-Fi enabled control panel so it only filmed during high-fives, cutting down on editing time.

"Using an Arduino Yun, which is a WiFi enabled Arduino board, I can control the GoPro," he wrote. "I'm using an accelerometer to determine when a high five is about to occur and tells the GoPro to start taking footage. After the high five has commenced, it tells the GoPro to stop capturing footage."

Maxwell-Parish recently tested his new camera by walking around San Francisco with his outstretched arm offering high fives to strangers.

The resulting footage might inspire you to high-five a few strangers, too.

Want to build your own? Maxwell-Parish shared his building instructions with Instructables.