Meet Slick, A Motorized GoPro Stabilizer For Action Sports

Slick is a new GoPro accessory launching today with an Indiegogo campaign. Instead of attaching your GoPro directly to something, you can put your GoPro into the Slick stabilizer and then attach the stabilizer to your helmet, drone or any other standard GoPro mount. It costs $179.

Here’s how it works. First, you have to charge the battery over micro USB, then you screw your GoPro inside the stabilizer with or without the waterproof housing and you’re done. Once you turn it on, Slick will compensate movements over three different axes. The battery lasts two hours.

Here’s a good example of what it looks like with and without Slick:

Of course, the raw GoPro video could have been stabilized with software stabilization. But there are drawbacks. First, the resolution of your video will be lower after using software stabilization.

Second, I played with a Slick prototype in person, and it works particularly great when you look around. Instead of filming your sudden movements, the GoPro will smoothly move from one angle to another, creating nice transitions between your movements.

You can shake the stabilizer in every direction and the GoPro stands still. It’s quite impressive to see how well Slick can compensate movements. While this GoPro accessory won’t be for everybody, I’m sure many GoPro video professionals will find this stabilizer useful.

Slick is waterproof and works with the GoPro Hero 3, Hero 3+, Hero 4 and the newly announced Hero 4 Session. The startup plans to ship in March 2016.