When I was a kid, it always used to bug me when someone was supposed to be talking on a locked-off "video phone" in a movie, and yet the phone would pan with them to keep them in the shot! Well, like a lot of other things from sci-fi movies of the past, motorized face-tracking webcams are now a reality - albeit, they're still not very common. As it turns out, however, more and more video calls are being made not from desktop computers, but from smartphones. So, that being the case, how do you go about getting one of those to pan with you? Well, you could buy something like the Swivl.

 

There are two parts to the Swivl. One of those is the motorized platform, that holds, pans and tilts the phone. The other is the marker, which is wirelessly tracked by the platform. Users can wear that marker to keep the camera trained on themselves, move it in their hand to direct the camera to something else, or hand it off to another speaker.