The technology used to create the popular "Wrath of the Titans" video game will be available to shoppers this summer in a camera that decides itself when to take a shot.
British company OMG's stop-motion technology is already used in a range of applications from making feature films and video games, to surveying roads and monitoring the movements of children with cerebral palsy.
Chief Executive Nick Bolton said the move into the consumer market was triggered when he noticed that cameras supplied as a memory aid for people with dementia were being used to record social events.
"As soon as you pick up a camera and decide to take a discrete frame, everyone changes slightly. They put on their photographic face," he told Reuters in an interview.
"This (camera) takes the frames between the frames you are taking anyway."
The device uses software developed by Microsoft in Cambridge, east England, to process data from motion and temperature sensors to work out when something worth capturing was happening, he said.
In testing, people have used the cameras to record daily activity around their kitchen table, an ad-hoc game of football and a stag night, he said.