Narrative Clip Review

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Netcasts you love.

[00:00:05] Speaker B: From people you trust.

[00:00:10] Speaker A: This is TWiT.

[00:00:12] Speaker B: Now, our last review of the day comes from, of course, the one and only Leo Laporte.

[00:00:17] Speaker A: Hello.

[00:00:18] Speaker B: Hello, Leo. How are you?

[00:00:19] Speaker A: I'm good. Another Kickstarter project.

[00:00:20] Speaker B: Yes.

[00:00:21] Speaker A: Like Sarah's.

[00:00:21] Speaker B: So you've been wearing this weird-looking thing on your shirt all day.

[00:00:25] Speaker A: All day? For the last 4 weeks.

[00:00:27] Speaker B: For 4 weeks?

[00:00:27] Speaker A: So this, uh, you just didn't notice, which is probably a good thing. This can get you beat up in the Mission District of San Francisco. This is— was— it was a Kickstarter project in the fall of 2012, at the time called Memoto, a Swedish company. By the time they were ready to ship these in late 2013, early 2014, they were renamed to Narrative. This is the Narrative Clip. Getnarrative.com. $279. What do you think that

[00:00:53] Speaker A: is when you look at it?

[00:00:53] Speaker B: Does it— does it talk to you? It must sound— there's a lens on it. Yeah, you know what it is.

[00:00:59] Speaker A: You're hoping that the people at the gym who see you wear this think it's a pedometer, because it is a It looks kind of like one. Yeah. And if they don't look too closely, they may not see the lens. That's a 5-megapixel camera with a 70-degree angle. So it's really— it's not super wide. It is— in fact, it's a little bit vaguely telephoto. And here's the thing. It has its own memory. And it takes pictures every 30

[00:01:24] Speaker A: seconds, just forever, always.

[00:01:26] Speaker B: Interesting. So it kind of— it seems like it's working out to be your own personal diary of sorts.

[00:01:32] Speaker A: It's something they call lifelogging. And it's actually— the idea's been around for many, many years. many years, going back to Steve Mann at MIT, who was, you know, wearing the thing.

[00:01:39] Speaker B: Oh, yes.

[00:01:40] Speaker A: And Gordon Bell, whose wife, Gwyn, founder of the Computer History Museum down in Mountain View, has Alzheimer's.

[00:01:50] Speaker B: Oh.

[00:01:50] Speaker A: And Gordon had been thinking about this kind of thing. He even wore a camera around his neck for a long time as a Microsoft fellow. But I think because of Gwyn, he became interested in the idea that this might help you with your memory.

[00:02:02] Speaker B: Wow.

[00:02:03] Speaker A: So if you don't know what you did— and so this would be useful to review your day, but more likely the idea is you've been wearing this over a period of years and now you've got a diary of your entire life. Now, of course, it's not got enough memory to record more than a day or so. Several thousand pictures.

[00:02:19] Speaker B: Well, now I'm considering buying one because I know somebody who has—

[00:02:22] Speaker A: It might be good for Alzheimer's patients. Yep. It has only about a day or 2 of battery life. So basically what happens is you get home and you plug it in. Yeah, you have to remember. That's a bed. You have to remember to plug it in, and you're going to plug it into a computer. It's got micro USB, so it'll work with any standard cable. And you're going to connect it to a Windows or a Mac PC because they have software. The software is going to pull the images that have been on the camera off

[00:02:47] Speaker A: the camera, as well as recharge it. There are 4 lights here that'll show you charge state. In fact, if I double tap—

[00:02:52] Speaker B: Do you have to wear their software, or do you have to use their software?

[00:02:54] Speaker A: You have to use their software, and it does an interesting thing that you may or may not like. It uses your computer as a temporary storage. You can have it save the pictures there, but there's so many they say you might not want to do this, this is gonna fill up your drive, and then uploads it to the Get Narrative servers. So your pictures don't actually live on your computer. That's not the normal way to use it unless you specifically ask. The idea is that they live on the server, and then they have

[00:03:20] Speaker A: an Android or iPhone app that you can browse through your pictures with.

[00:03:23] Speaker B: Oh, I see.

[00:03:24] Speaker A: So you need a computer You need an Android or iPhone device, Android or iOS device. It doesn't have an iPad app, but I'm gonna show it to you on the iPad. And then you're gonna— you get a year free, but eventually you're gonna have to pay Narrative to store these pictures. It's quite a bit of data.

[00:03:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it sounds slightly expensive, and it also makes my little red flag of privacy go off.

[00:03:48] Speaker A: Well, there's so many red flags that are gonna go off with this thing. I mean, first of all, you're wearing it everywhere. The bathroom, the gym, to bed. You're wearing it everywhere. So at some point, somebody's gonna figure out, dude, you're taking— I mean, if you think Google Glass is offensive, this is worse. There's no way of knowing it's taking a picture. It doesn't really announce itself as a camera.

[00:04:07] Speaker B: So is it taking pictures right now?

[00:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah. The theory, though, is that it's just for you. This is not— you're not gonna post it. And when you see the pictures, you'll realize why. Couple of things, a couple of user interface notes. If you double tap it, it says take a picture right now. And it marks it as a favorite in the collection. It figures, well, you must have wanted that one. If you put it face down, It senses that it's dark and stops. So that's one way to either turn it off or to save battery life. It also knows what position

[00:04:33] Speaker A: it's in, so you can clip it in any way.

[00:04:35] Speaker B: Oh, that's cool. So it'll automatically rotate.

[00:04:37] Speaker A: It has a magnetometer, accelerometer, uh, does not have a GPS. Doesn't know where you are.

[00:04:43] Speaker B: Probably good.

[00:04:45] Speaker A: Well, I, you know, I think what happened— they took more than a year to get this out. They thought they'd be out a lot sooner. It turned out to be harder to do this than they thought. I think that's what happened. Let me show you The user interface of the pictures. This is the Narrative app. Now I'm going to show you on an iPad. It's an iPhone app. So let me show you the interface. This is the Narrative app. It's free, by the way, and you can download it on Android or iOS. This is— I'm using it on an iPad, but

[00:05:10] Speaker A: it's really an iPhone app. The settings, not much, right?

[00:05:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it looks pretty easy.

[00:05:18] Speaker A: Nothing, in fact. It interfaces to the Narrative servers, though, in Sweden, right? So these are the starred photos. Those are the ones I double-tapped. And you can— so you can see those presumably are the ones you care a lot about. And you're probably noticing right now a little something. These pictures suck. So there are a couple of reasons that they suck. One is that you're wearing a kind of cheap camera on

[00:05:43] Speaker A: your lapel.

[00:05:45] Speaker B: Right.

[00:05:45] Speaker A: And so what it's recording is not necessarily what you would record if you were taking a picture. Now here's an example. I put this on a ledge, so it recorded me, and this is something you can do. You don't have to be wearing it. So it recorded me sitting at my computer for hours on end. Big deal. This is MacBreak Weekly. We can go through this.

[00:06:04] Speaker B: We got your microphone.

[00:06:05] Speaker A: This is my point of view. Now there's another issue that's probably unique to me. I got a bit of a belly, and so the The thing is tilted up. So it's always looking up. So here I am at home, and then I get in the car, and I drive. You see that? I get in the car, but it's looking up. It's not—

[00:06:22] Speaker B: Right.

[00:06:23] Speaker A: So you're never— none of these pictures are going to be anything that you really— I mean, I'm not going to share this to Twitter, to Instagram, but— It's kind of cool. It might be enough to tell me where I was, what I did today, right? And if you talk to somebody for any length of time, you'll see their face. You'll say, oh yeah, I had a nice conversation with that guy. What you mostly realize is how much time you spend sitting at a computer, for one thing. At

[00:06:48] Speaker A: least me, and I think many of the people who watch this show. Now notice this is trimmed the moment because of the accelerometer, and it can kind of know if some pictures are going to be blurry or not good. If you untrim them, it went trimmed went from 158 pictures, untrimmed 329 pictures. So you can, you know, it's storing a lot of pictures. This is 329 photos over a 2-hour period. And as you can see, it's

[00:07:13] Speaker A: a lot, but it's not that interesting, right? Now I'm in my office sitting. That's what it looks like when I'm sitting. So you're not in most of these pictures unless you take it off, you put it on a ledge. But if you, you know, if you— it'll be great. When I first got it, I suppose it's here, I wore it At a party. So I got to see kind of the party.

[00:07:35] Speaker B: That's cool.

[00:07:35] Speaker A: Yeah, and so that was kind of fun. This goes back to March. Well, I don't see the party on here.

[00:07:42] Speaker B: How did you get all those photos?

[00:07:43] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's a photo every 30 seconds, 2 photos a minute, 120 photos an hour. It's a lot of photos.

[00:07:49] Speaker B: It seems so niche to me. It feels like I personally wouldn't need it.

[00:07:54] Speaker A: Yeah, well, first of all, it's $279. I don't recommend it. I mean, this is definitely a do not buy. I'll give you the pros and cons, but I will say that there is something going on here. They were trying to raise $50,000. They raised half a million dollars. There's definitely interest in the idea of lifelogging. The pros are that it does, you know, pretty much what it says it does. It has enough memory to take pictures every 30 seconds. It can do a whole day. It can actually do a day and a half or 2 days. All

[00:08:20] Speaker A: of that works. It uploads to the servers effectively.

[00:08:22] Speaker B: Great.

[00:08:22] Speaker A: I used the Mac client. Worked fine. You plug it in and it immediately starts to pull the pictures off. The negatives are the pictures aren't great because it's, A, it's 5 megapixels, and B, it's only 70-degree angle. It's a fairly narrow— it's fairly telephoto. So you don't— I would— I think this should be like 24mm lens. This should be an 18mm. It should be a big wide fisheye.

[00:08:43] Speaker B: Right.

[00:08:43] Speaker A: Because then I'd see more of what's going on. I'm surprised they didn't do that. And then of course the cost is a little high, and the privacy implication and the chances of getting beat up in the Mission District Hi as well. On the other hand, I should say that there is something here. The idea, it's part of this quantified self, the idea that your life can be remembered in this passive way. I

[00:09:09] Speaker A: just wish it were better pictures. And I wish I were in them.

[00:09:12] Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:13] Speaker A: So, what I often did is I'd put it on a shelf here. I'd stick it somewhere like that. And see, if I did this, It would see me, and then, you know, that might be what you'd end up doing. But that does raise another negative. It's very easy to lose. Look at that.

[00:09:25] Speaker B: Can you see it? That's true. It's very small, very lightweight.

[00:09:28] Speaker A: I lost it a couple of times. Where'd it go? It's in the seat of the car. You know, I left it behind. So, you know, I lose Fitbits every 5 or 6 weeks. So this is a $279 doodad that is going to be very easy to lose. You're lucky I still have it for review.

[00:09:44] Speaker B: Maybe they should put a little GPS in it so you can track it.

[00:09:47] Speaker A: Yeah, or some beeper or something. I just think mostly, you know, you're gonna get in trouble if you wear this around. I wore it at the gym and I thought, I just— somebody's gonna slug me.

[00:09:54] Speaker B: It does feel a little awkward to know that you're taking photos all the time.

[00:09:56] Speaker A: Well, I know what I'm doing. I'm taking a picture of you every 30 seconds. It's very weird.

[00:10:01] Speaker B: So do you give it a buy, try, or ignore?

[00:10:03] Speaker A: No, it's a don't buy. It's too expensive. But I praise the guys at Narrative. I think this is a great idea. Continue working on this. I'm glad I gave them my money because I want to support this. I think there's something here. This is probably, you know, you know if it's for you. It's probably not for you.