Quirky’s quest to put electronic gadgets inside your fridge continues! Last month, the industrial design startup unveiled the Egg Minder to help shoppers keep track of how many fresh eggs are left in the fridge. With the Insider camera, however, you won’t just keep tabs on the eggs. The Insider is like a paparazzi for the contents of your refrigerator, snapping photos of what’s sitting around each time you open the door.
Think of it as Snapchat for the fridge if you will. Unless you’re good at making grocery lists and updating it thoroughly before making the trip to the supermarket, you might not remember exactly what you’ll need to buy. If you spontaneously decide to try a new recipe you just found, you might also want to check in the fridge to see what ingredients you already have. The Insider will take a photo that you can remotely access via an iOS app so you can refer to the contents whenever you decide to stop for a quick grocery trip.
The Insider has built-in sensors to recognize when the fridge door is open so it can take a wide-lens photo of the products sitting inside. It also comes equipped with anti-fog lens to prevent blurry photos when the device changes temperature. Quirky states that you can stick the Insider in the fridge like you would with water bottles and condiments, but we do have to wonder how hard it will be to angle the device to capture the full fridge clearly. The company has not released information on the device’s resolution capacity just yet.
Insider is also best used when your fridge is neatly organized. If you’re like me and you’ve got take-out boxes blocking some of the stuff sitting in the back, it could still be hard to keep track of the entire fridge’s content or how long those things have been there.
Still, we give credits to the idea and think it’s always neat to have visual reminders as they can help trigger better memory than just words on a note-taking app. This is also helpful for remembering the exact brands of products you bought last time, or for tracking whether your roommate really did take your yogurt while you were out at the gym.
The Insider, which is a product of the company’s partnership with GE, has passed Quirky’s prototyping phase and is now currently crowdsourcing retail pricing. As it stands, Quirky participants thinks the device is worth about $20. Do you agree?
