The Cradle is a ski helmet with a built in action camera. This product was inspired by Michael Schumacher’s tragic accident while skiing in the French Alps in late 2013.

 

Whilst he was wearing a ski helmet, he also had attached an POV helmet mounted action camera. He went down in what would have usually not been a major crash but because of the camera mount, the helmet split and cause immediate injury to Michael’s head.

 

With this in mind, I designed a ski helmet with an action camera built into the shell to mitigate any effects that external fixings might have. The idea behind a traditional helmet is to distribute the impact load across the whole shell in the event of a collision. When you have something hard attached to the helmet, it focused the entire impact load on that point and means that the helmet does not function as it is supposed to.

 

The design of the helmet is a simple contemporary style with the intent of appealing to the youth culture within skiing. This is because younger people are most often using emerging technologies like action cameras but also are often doing more extreme and dangerous things on the mountain and are subsequently more likely to be involved in an accident.

 

Having the camera mounted underneath the shell of the helmet means that you don’t run the risk of impairing the helmet’s protective function. Camera technology these days is getting smaller and smaller and with the space allocated to the camera, it can shoot up to 4k resolution or up to 120fps frame rate.