Forget selfie sticks, this is the future of selfies. Meet the Gigabyte Selfie Assistant, an unnecessarily high-tech invention for those who love themselves more than anything other than taking good photos…of themselves.
The product name is exceptionally apt: the Gigabyte Selfie Assistant offers a diverse set of features that ensure you take the best selfies and wefies all the time. This 285g product looks like a Bluetooth speaker with a gap at the top to securely mount your smartphone in, and its upper portion is motorised, allowing it to swivel quite freely. What’s very impressive about this is in its application: the Selfie Assistant app’s face detection feature swivels the device so that the front facing camera always keeps the subject (or subjects, depending on how many faces are there) in the frame.
There’s also a tiny Infrared Remote Control, daintily held by a man in the picture above, offering more control over a smartphone’s front facing camera. There’s not only a remote shutter button, but also arrow keys to pan the camera to your desired angle, as well as zoom in/out for the perfect frame. Let’s also not forget the infra-red feature built into the remote, because it’s just as cool as the face tracking feature: one feature on the app forces the camera to “follow” the remote control, panning in the remote control’s general direction as you move it around in your hand.
And of course, if it can swivel 360 degrees, it can also take 360-degree panorama shots. Finally, the Selfie Assistant, which charges via microUSB, is also able to tilt backwards (up to 15 degrees) and forwards (up to 10 degrees).
Oh, and both the Selfie Assistant SA-101 and SA-102 feature a standard 1/4″ tripod mount for even more creative uses.
As a maker of PC hardware that’s synonymous with gaming, it is only natural that Gigabyte takes an idea and push it beyond what’s necessary – I wager some inside the company would have voted for it to be called “Gigabyte Gaming Selfie Pro” – but it is very likely that that name would not appeal to the Selfie Assistant’s target market. Instead, what we have here is a very advanced selfie-taking tool with an operating life of 1 hour per charge that holds devices with up to 5.5-inch displays and with a maximum weight of 200g. The app is also supported on all Android 4.3 and iOS 7 devices or newer.
But, technological advancements, whatever they may be, doesn’t come cheap. The Gigabyte Selfie Assistant SA-101 is expected to be released in August this year at a retail price of $199 (about RM730), while a lower-end version, bearing the model number SA-102, will go for $79 (about RM290). This stripped down version, which weighs 125g, removes the motorised swivel for a manual tile angle, no infra-red sensor tracking, but with a larger 1,600mAh battery that yields three hours of continuous use. It’ll also support up to 5.5-inch devices with a maximum weight of 300g.
