Lightweight hi-definition GoPro video cameras are commonly used to film daredevil sporting stunts, from mountain biking to paragliding and skateboarding – all from the point of view of the person wearing them.
But one entrepreneur in San Francisco is using the technology to tell a different kind of story.
Kevin Adler founded the Homeless GoPro project to give some of the six and a half thousand people living on the city's streets a chance to document their experiences firsthand.
He hopes the resulting videos will help build a bridge between the wealthy and those who are down on their luck.
Rebecca Bowring reports.
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44 year-old Adam Reichart has been homeless, on and off, for the last thirty years.
He sells Street Sheet, a newspaper written by people of no fixed abode, in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco.
With a one dollar per issue suggested donation, he makes fifteen to twenty dollars a day.
SOT Adam Reichart, Co-founder, Homeless GoPro
I don't believe that compassionate empathy is part of just homelessness, I think society is losing it in general. And I think technology's got a lot to do with that. When people are not having face-to-fact contact, you lose your social skills. A lot of the people in the last year or two who have moved here look at people who are on the streets, not just me but people in general who area on the streets, as lower than them, and that really hurts my heart.
Reichart was the first volunteer to take part in Homeless GoPro, a project giving people on the streets wearable hi-definition video cameras to record the world as they experience it...
And that means sometimes feeling invisible.
UPSOUND
I'm trying to get enough for a month's rent…have a good day, you guys.
Homeless GoPro was co-founded by entrepreneur Kevin Adler in memory of his uncle Mark, who suffered from schizophrenia and spent three decades sporadically living on the streets.
Adler met Reichart through a local organization facilitating donations for the homeless.
Personal camera-maker GoPro gave one of its devices to the cause… and Adler's trained Reichart to use it…
The entrepreneur says the technology is perfectly suited to capturing a person's experiences first hand.
SOT Kevin Adler, Co-founder, Homeless GoPro
It's a great device that allows you to continue to live your life like normal. Suddenly you can walk around, you can narrate your own experiences.
Several videos on HomelessGoPro.com clocked up over 100,000 views in just a couple of weeks.
They've prompted a flurry of donations for Reichart, who's since been able to move into a hotel.
UPSOUND, protesters
In recent months, San Francisco has seen regular protests against tech giants like Twitter, Google, Apple whose handsomely-paid employees are blamed for soaring rent and eviction rates.
Rather than widening the gulf between rich and poor, Kevin Adler hopes to show that technology can be used to bring them closer together.
SOT Kevin Adler, Co-founder, Homeless GoPro
It's not just capturing a homeless person on the streets, it's capturing how they interact with people and the little implicit traumas as well as the joys that they feel on a daily basis by being human, and that something that we hope to connect to other people who are maybe not homeless but to better understand each other's experiences.
The project's team of volunteers are working to partner with service organizations and homeless shelters to tell more stories like Adam Reichart's.
They say that while they don't aim to solve the endemic problem of homelessness, they do hope to foster greater empathy for people living on the fringes of society.
Rebecca Bowring, San Francisco