Looki Launches AI-Powered Wearable Chest Camera

"The Most Innovation-Respecting Episode Yet 👊"

I've had the Looki L1 for two months now, and my biggest takeaway is this: what looks like a kiddie smartwatch is actually a budget body cam, a pedestrian recorder if you will.

Not only does the image quality hark back to the 1980s, but it occasionally just starts talking out of nowhere.

And I mean actually talking. No joke. Sometimes I'll be wearing this thing at dinner with someone, and it'll suddenly go: "What were you guys just talking about? Do you need my help?"

I'm like, what help could a pedestrian recorder possibly offer? The biggest help would be not secretly recording my embarrassing moments.

Then there's Looki's main selling point — life-logging — and the Vlogs it generates feel like the incoherent ramblings of a drunk Northeastern Auntie Rain randomly mashing keyboard shortcuts.

I wore Looki skiing for a full day recently, running its flagship Story mode, and this is what it churned out:

The footage gave me a headache. Basically chronological random clips thrown together. And why does it keep including shots of me sitting around on my phone? Feels like it's aggressively monitoring me.

Big Looki is Watching You 🫵🏼

My impression of its video generation: the barely watchable clips are all outdoors. Low-light and indoor footage? So noisy it looks like it was shot with a visual ear-pick camera. Let's just say 1080p no longer meets the people's growing demands for quality imaging — Looki delivers that Japanese City Pop 80s retro MV aesthetic!

Makes my ears itch just watching it. Yes my love to you Stay with me I'm about to start singing 🎤

What's a visual ear-pick camera, you ask? Here's a taste.

Most importantly, I don't get Looki's design philosophy.

The key to Vlogging is source material. Garbage in, garbage out — no editing technique can save trash footage. Looki captures everything from a pedestrian-recorder perspective on my chest. Is this a genuine design choice or advanced trolling? Do they really believe eyes on the chest better capture the good life?

As for the Looki L1 hardware, besides the camera, there's a back panel for charging and magnetic attachment — but on my unit, it's glued on.

Domestic price: ¥1,499. Overseas: $199. Isn't this a bit too cheap, bro?

Did you get absolutely rinsed by some Shenzhen flip-flop hardware bro? Want me to introduce you to a gentler hardware youngster? 😭

The camera's "moving" image quality does come with one upside: the Looki L1 weighs only 32 grams, and wearing it on a lanyard is genuinely unnoticeable.

But here's the problem — it shakes way too easily, and the camera stabilization is inadequate. Every clip comes out shaky. And if you use the official method of magnetic chest attachment, it's prone to falling off.

I originally brought it to Myanmar for National Day, planning to show it around the compounds and broaden its horizons. But I lost it during a layover in Cambodia — got bumped in a crowd, no idea where it went. Sent multiple emails to the airline, never found it. Had to buy another one.

(I genuinely wonder: besides cute investors gifting these to their LPs, who buys two Lookis? Maybe only Muqiu would get harvested twice by Haidian bros, and still expense it through the葬爱咸鱼有限公司 company account 😭 — Xianyu)

So now whenever I go out wearing Looki, I keep patting myself down to check if it's still there. I've basically acquired an ancestor — ancestral tablet hanging from my chest.

Another issue: since Looki L1 is chest-mounted, the angle easily invites accusations of covert filming. Wear it on the subway or bus, encounter the wrong sensitive type, and you can't rule out trending on Weibo.

I wore it to events and kept getting asked if I was recording. Made me feel like an undercover plant in the compounds — though I don't recall any Fujianese老乡 hideouts in Beijing 😭

Chest-mounted cameras are just too invasive.

Meanwhile, actual body cams on Taobao mostly cost just a few hundred yuan and support 10+ hours of continuous recording.

I did my homework: at the ¥1,500 price point, body cams come with infrared night vision, red-blue strobe lights, gas protection, real-time upload, and more.

Looki's specs: record 5 seconds every minute, 9-hour battery life. No continuous recording option. Is AI money just too easy to make? 😭

Anyway, back to Looki.

Looki does have a privacy light, but it's weak and nearly invisible — and you can manually turn it off. A friend said wearing it feels like being a Looki company camera. Some helpful netizen previously commented that they were on the same floor as Looki's office and saw someone wearing this thing into the bathroom.

I can't help but ask the big question: Does Looki auto-recognize bathroom scenes and shut off? Does their cloud database have footage of me peeing? I'm scared the bros will use this to blackmail me into deleting this review 😭

After two months of heavy use — taking it to Myanmar, skiing, meeting countless ego-inflated crazy young founders and cute investors who love asking about your moat — I've come to a profound realization: for life-video recording, the more sensible device is glasses.

What you see is what you get. What the eye sees is what matters, plus you control the angle freely. And AI glasses look relatively normal, people are used to them, no creepy surveillance vibe.

So when will the great Shenzhen supply chain solve AI glasses' battery life and weight issues? 40+ grams without prescription lenses, 50+ with — genuinely uncomfortable.

I suggest all the major players put in more effort. Software design can always be copied from startups later 💪

On the software side, the homepage and marketing flagship Vlog feature is ultra-low-frequency demand. If I weren't making this review, I wouldn't want to wear this thing.

Real Vlog users only remember to use it for travel and concerts. For them, the best current solution is using DJI or Insta360's proper imaging gear, then editing yourself — or better yet, those two should build in editing tools for everyone.

I suggest Insta360 just acquire AI Vlog (myaivlog.com). The results are mediocre but optimizable. I can introduce you to the founder for a discount.

Looki's big story is that it's "a second brain with memory, knowledge compression, and extremely high information processing efficiency."

Roughly: your videos upload to the cloud for LLM analysis. The more you feed it, the more it understands.

But there's a bug: video upload requires both charging and Wi-Fi connection. Hugely inconvenient — I can barely remember to charge my Apple Watch daily, let alone charge my second brain for upload.

Another hassle: shooting several GBs of garbage footage daily. Do I have to pay to store it?

Current pricing: ¥39.9/month for 500GB storage, ¥69.9 for 1TB. So either pay to hoard garbage like a chump, or go free with 30GB/7 days and have goldfish memory.

I also doubt video is the best analytical material. Most white-collar workers commute an hour or two by subway, sit at desks staring at computers all day — browser history, WeChat chats, and Lark docs know far more about their day.

Even if you believe video is the information-richest medium, the more logical hardware entry point is glasses, not chest cams.

Looki's other flagship feature is Q&A — analyzing past footage to answer your questions.

But in practice, it's a novelty function, somewhat redundant. Looki's AI can't even accurately identify my meal calories yet.

For example, when I asked about my skiing day itinerary, that was accurate — it even knew I had dinner at Baroun. But ask how many people I was with and it starts hallucinating: it used my McDonald's footage to analyze "at least two snowboards, so two people." In reality we were all on skis — we've drawn a clear line with the snowboard youngsters.

I also asked: how long did I drive during those two skiing days?

First, I wasn't driving on the way there. Second, why shortchange me an hour on the return? People will think I was doing 180 km/h on the highway. Looki, don't report me to traffic police and get me arrested.

I also saw a use case where if you lose your keys, you can ask Looki where you put them.

For current-stage Looki, this is pure storytelling. Take Story mode now: 3-minute setting records 11 seconds. Pure random capture, zero algorithmic recognition. Who knows what this thing actually catches?

The one time Looki genuinely impressed me: after summarizing my day, it suddenly asked, "Want me to find a nine-grid for your Moments post and write the caption?"

After I asked about driving time, it followed up asking if I wanted to make a WeChat shareable card:

Borrowing from former fashion editor Luozi Ma's brilliant positioning: Looki is basically the recording-card girlie version.

Correct. The bro AI hardware is Plaud; the girlie AI hardware is Looki.

Looki genuinely suits filming "high-energy college student day" content for Xiaohongshu — prop it on your desk during class or internship, auto-edit, and if they added auto-post to Xiaohongshu it'd be full PMF.

So buy Plaud if you're in meetings all day; buy Looki if you love posting Xiaohongshu flexing your ByteDance employee badge. This does not constitute purchase advice — identity cannot be defined 👋😭👋

I also thought of two practical use cases for Looki. One: give it to anthropology professors doing fieldwork or documentary directors, distribute to people across industries to wear all day, then publish papers or compile for international film festivals.

Or Looki could pose as a nuclear weapon for threatening HR during severance negotiations. After all, no one knows it only does interval recording.

All that said, Looki does have innovation and courage, pioneering a new category. For glasses, I'd comparison shop and carefully consider between giants.

AI chest cams? Only one player. Just like 2023 when only Plaud was making recording cards — useful or not, they were first. Stick it out a couple more years and maybe the wind arrives.

I've distilled a hardware success formula: differentiated positioning (ring or chest cam) + existing tech integration (Shenzhen supply chain + mature software + LLM) = investor-beloved AI hardware.

I sincerely suggest to aspiring founders: think about what else the human body can wear. Child, you must think deeper.

Xianyu and I think AI earrings have potential — equally useless, but cool as hell. If anyone steals this idea, pay us creative fees, genuinely supporting theoretical innovation.

To wrap up: AI hardware is still in the greater-fool amusement phase. The only real paying customers are tech optimists who love big stories and blindly believe evil tech giants won't destroy humanity.

So whenever I mention Looki to people, the conversation always ends with: would anyone really pay $200 for this? That's a full year of GPT Plus.

"Yeah, fuck, I bought two."

(Illustrations generated by ChatGPT, purely human-written 🤓 Xianyu also contributed to this article)