LAS VEGAS — What if your entire life was like a Russian dash cam? Our phones already know where we are and what we’re doing every moment of the day, but the Narrative Clip takes things to the next level.
This tiny little square clips onto your person and takes a 5 megapixel photo every 30 seconds. Apparently wearing such a thing makes you a “lifelogger,” which sounds like a great term to drop on a first date. Then again, once you admit that you’re wearing an always-on camera during a date, it won’t really matter if you call it lifelogging or not. You’re not getting a second shot.
The Clip communicates with a companion iOS app that shows a timeline of the photos you’ve stored in Narrative’s free cloud service. Getting photos onto the cloud itself is a little rudimentary right now, as you have to connect the Clip to your Mac via USB to have them uploaded. From there, the Narrative app assembles a timeline of what it algorithmically determines to be the most interesting photos you’ve taken. (Double tapping the Clip while in use manually takes a photo that’s sure to make it into the timeline.)
There are some bells and whistles that help make the Clip’s $200 price point more bearable, like how it automatically turns off in a dark room or when it’s set face-down on a table. But when you can almost get an iPad mini for the same price, it’s hard to justify the purchase.
The upcoming Clip 2 looks much more interesting with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth for wirelessly beaming pictures to your iPhone. It also has a higher quality 8 megapixel, 90-degree lens. Narrative hasn’t announced a release date for the Clip 2 yet beyond sometime in 2015, which is only a little more information than when we know Apple is shipping its Watch.
Is there real value to being a lifelogger? Probably not. Am I still going to be one for the duration of CES this week? Totally.
