Facebook-ready mobile lets babies upload selfies and status updates from their cribs

The toy - called 'New Born Fame' - was built by designer Laura Cornet

James Vincent
Wednesday 05 November 2014 07:26 EST
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At what age would you let your child take their first selfie? 10 years old? Six? Younger than that?

Well, with a newly unveiled internet-connected mobile even babies can get involved – posting selfies and updates to Facebook and Twitter whenever they reach up to touch a plush version of the social networks’ icons.

It’s a gadget that will give most people the creeps, but luckily that’s exactly what its creator – Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Laura Cornet - intended.

Cornet says she was worried by the established trend for new parents to continually post photos and updates of their babies – some literally minutes after birth – sharing their life (well, their new family’s life) with strangers.

A selfie taken with Cornet's mobile.
A selfie taken with Cornet's mobile.
A Facebook update tracking the baby's activity in the crib.
A Facebook update tracking the baby's activity in the crib.
The motion-sensitive camera that hangs on the side of the crib and snaps pictures and video.
The motion-sensitive camera that hangs on the side of the crib and snaps pictures and video.

"I thought it was weird to be involved in the life of someone, who doesn't even know that I have seen everything in his life already," Cornet told design blog Dezeen. "And the baby couldn't make a choice to maybe not show me."

Cornet says that some of the reaction to the story has been furious but that this just proved her point; how much of a difference is there between a parent sharing a photo of a baby and the baby ‘sharing’ it? In both scenarios the baby is clueless.

Other parents, however, haven’t seen the mobile as an art project but as a real, commercial project. Cornet told CNN that she had even begun work on a mobile that sends the images and videos directly to parents’ smartphones – rather than social networks.

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