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OpenAI 为其 Codex 应用引入人工智能生成的宠物
The Verge
05-03 21:00
您可以根据需要随时更新这张照片。 我喜欢朋友们的冰箱里贴满宝丽来照片。这通常是他们生活中发生的事情的视觉速成课程,记...
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I love when my friends have their fridges covered in Polaroids. It’s often a visual crash course of what’s been going on in their lives chronicling recent adventures, get-togethers, and other fun moments. But I don’t love the idea of schlepping around a clunky instant camera or paying a premium for instant film with hit-or-miss results. That’s why I’m infatuated with these magnetic digital Polaroids from a small company called VidaBay. They look like instant photos, but use NFC tech and color E Ink screens so you can change the image as often as you want without ever having to charge a battery.
At roughly 4mm thick and 2.5 inches in size, the VidaBay NFC E-Paper Fridge Magnet — also known as the Snap — reminds me of Xteink’s tiny X3 e-reader, but it doesn’t have any buttons, ports, or connectors. The Snap is more like a very tiny version of the Aura Ink digital photo frame you can stick to your fridge.
VidaBay NFC E-Paper Fridge Magnet
Where to Buy: $35.99 $30.99 at VidaBay $99.99 $88.99 at VidaBay (three-pack) $27.99 at Amazon
The Snap uses the same kind of NFC chip that lets your smartphone double as your credit or debit card. Using an accompanying mobile app images are wirelessly transferred by aligning your smartphone’s NFC antenna to the one located inside the lower left corner of the Snap.
Changing the photo the Snap displays takes about 25 to 30 seconds. While the actual image transfer is a 10-second process, the rest of the time is used to refresh the Snap’s E Ink screen. Unlike devices such as the Kindle Colorsoft that use a black and white e-paper screen overlaid with a color filter so screen refreshes happen almost instantly, the Snap uses e-paper with multiple color pigments that take much longer to refresh. The results look better, but you’ll have to wait a little longer for them.
The process of updating the Snap with a new image using NFC is easy once you master it, but it can take a few attempts to get there. Out of the box the device comes with a plastic screen protector that’s printed with a guide so you know exactly how to position your smartphone to ensure the NFC antennas line up. But the guide only works for the iPhone. Android is also supported, but its up to you to figure out exactly where your device’s NFC chip is located which can take some trial and error. The Snap and your smartphone also need to be held very close for the NFC pairing to work – closer than a case allows. The process doesn’t work with my iPhone 16 Pro inside a leather Nomad case, and even the thin silicone case protecting my OnePlus 12 was too thick for the NFC transfers to succeed.
One of the many advantages of E Ink’s display tech is that, similar to an Etch A Sketch or Magna Doodle toy, once an image is formed it remains on screen without any additional power. That’s why e-readers have such excellent battery life. The Snap comes with a 2.5-inch E Ink screen, and while it uses color technology similar to what you’ll find in large, vibrant, and expensive E Ink posters, it’s actually a repurposed Spectra 3100 screen that E Ink specifically developed for retail use as an electronic shelf label.
They’re cheaper, but the Snap’s color screen is also limited to only displaying black, white, red, and yellow, which limits its ability to accurately reproduce colors. It’s a big tradeoff, but not necessarily a dealbreaker. The VidaBay mobile app lets you crop, zoom, rotate, add filters, and make basic brightness, contrast, and color saturation adjustments to images selected from your phone’s camera roll. Because the transfer process can take upwards of 30 seconds, the app also generates a preview of what the image will look like on the Snap’s four-color screen.
After using the Snap for a couple of weeks I have a better idea of what images will look good on its E Ink screen, and which won’t. Brighter photos with lots of contrast work well, as do photos with color palettes leaning toward red