Capture It All With GiGa Selfie

The selfie stick and video-recording drones will soon be distant memories in the land of travel products that capture what’s going on around you. Recently launched in Australia by the nation’s board of tourism, Tourism Australia, the GiGA selfie is the world’s first selfie device that takes your photo from a far-away distance with the simultaneous ability to capture your surroundings, all without that pesky — and sometimes obvious — selfie stick.

While standing on a GiGA-designated pod, the GiGA selfie snaps your photo up close at the command of a button on your smartphone app, then takes additional photos as the lens slowly zooms out, revealing a landscape only a photographer would be able to capture from hundreds of feet away.

To test the device’s capabilities, a group of Japanese tourists gathered on the Gold Coast in Australia to snap the world’s biggest selfies in an effort to promote Australia as a destination for Japanese travelers. Participants were allowed to partake in the selfie-taking and received emails of their shots. Once they have the images, subjects can zoom in or out, or capture any part of the photo that they want to preserve. They can also activate a zoom functionality that allows them to create a dynamic image, starting from their faces and then zooming out to show the entirety of what was captured.