Re-inventing the selfie, introducing CamMe. Gone are the days of the awkward angles, bathroom mirror shots and your arm holding the camera taking up half the frame. The premise is simple – hands free camera – to be able to take photos without touching your phone at all. The app’s gestural control systems works in much the same way as Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360. It’s refreshingly clean and simply – no social sharing aspect, no library of effects or filters. Choose your camera (front or rear), hold you hand up for recognition, then close it again to take the shot (Mostly reliable except sometimes in low light conditions – but what camera doesn’t struggle in low light conditions anyway?). The images get stored to your camera roll and can be emailed from within that app. Future versions are to add video capabilities, which will expand its possibilities a great deal. Personally, for someone who is constantly taking snapshots on my phone, it excites me have a new relationship with the camera, and no, not just for selfies.
So this is an awesome novelty app for “die-hard” (haha) fans of “The Walking Dead”, or any zombie fanatic really. It’s super simple and very intuitive. First you upload a photo, either from your gallery or you take a new one (like Instagram). Then you play around with all the gruesome add-ons: eyes, mouth, accessories and filters. The features actually integrate really well with your original image (as in they don’t look they’ve been stuck on in a bad Photoshop job), I was quite surprised. And the icons representing these categories are a fun take on the typically unimaginative icons that apps use, I especially like the axe. Once you have “deadened” yourself, you can save and share your work of art. Here’s the website where you can check out all the other walkers:
1. Brainstorming food, having just spent Christmas with my family back home, the experience of feeding my young nieces came to mind. Every meal was a spectacle, a test of hand-eye coordination, with one hand attempted to empty spoonfuls of rice into their distracted mouths, and the other flailing to catch broccoli florets they catapulted across the room. I thought I could translate this domestic circus into a silly game involving finger-eye coordination. The aim of the game would be to feed the baby with one finger and catch flying food with the other (aiming to get more in the mouth than on the floor). Difficulty could be increased from level to level by introducing obstacles in the room making it harder to catch food, or requiring certain finger-gestures to feed the baby such as a zig-zag notion to imitate the aeroplane technique (“open wide, coming in for landing!”).
2. As an Aussie, one of the first things people often say to me upon learning this is “throw some shrimp on the barbie!” (For anyone interested, the phrase originates from a series of TV ads for Australian tourism starring Paul Hogan – aka Crocodile Dundee – where he says “I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you.”) Again, I thought this could be a fun game, where you have to toss shrimp onto a barbie (before they go off in the heat), and take them off the barbie when they’re done (before they burn). Variables making the game harder could include keeping the shrimp away from the neighbour’s dog, catching the beer keg before it spills all over the food, stopping the hills hoist from swinging over the barbie and catching the washing alight, moving the barbie from falling drop bears (and countless other Aussie clichés).
3. On a more serious/practical note, I thought of an app that reveals chef secrets to loyal customers. My flatmate is a vegan, (which can be quite expensive), so she is constantly saying things to me like “I wish I knew how to make those vegan treats at the Bean”. Perhaps each user has a list of their top five favourite restaurants in the city (which can be edited at any point), and the further up the list, and the longer you have a restaurant on your list, the more perks you will get from them. Rewards could include cooking tips, season specials, recipes, coupons etc.