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Microsoft Gadget Keeps Record of Your Life
An anonymous reader writes "SenseCam, touted as a visual diary of sorts by Microsoft Corp., is designed to be worn around the neck and take up to 2,000 images a 12-hour day automatically. The prototype responds to changes such as bright lights and sudden movements and might one day even respond to other stimuli such as heart rate or skin temperature -- to track medical problems as easily as to record a Hawaiian vacation."
"Strange days" anyone? Can users sell thier "Record of Your Life recordings"? Can "Record of Your Life recordings" be held against you in a court of law?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
the communications relvolution is slowly becoming a digital prison
Never underestimate the logical power of sarcasm
The millions of blogs out there didn't clog searches up nearly enough, now maybe we can fill google image search with the hundreds of thousands of pictures that will now go along with the description of "got up this morning, had breakfast, went out of the front door..."
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
it captures VGA sized pics.. how well can it grab handwritten notes or (as I read in another article) a bottle of wine well enough that you can ID it?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
A company called Videolife has a more primitive, but essentially the same thing, in the early 90s.
That was my impression, from reading the article in question.
-MT.
-MT.
For those who missed the link, or didn't even read the article before posting, here's a list of other hardware MS Research is (or has been) working on. Stick to software, guys!
Big Brither uses aside, this could be a good thing for the military, border patrol, TSA, etc. Instead of security cameras (or in addition to I should say...so I will), employees at probable crime jobs/locations such as banks, 7-11, et al. could use such devices to capture additional information (perhaps in addition to videa, audio as well).
/. would show up in the images. Of course we would counter by taking a picture of a Word document or a vi editor (of correct scale of course) and sticking in front of the camera.
Now of course you could have an employer that makes you wear one one you come to work and turn it in at the end of the day. Makes you wonder how many times
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
If I ever see people start carrying one of these, I'll start carrying a can of black spray paint.
Isn't this similar to a slashdot story of about 2 years ago?
Basically a small recorder that broadcasted a RFID, and would record that of others.
This would result in a log of every RFID tag you came across, remember what books you looked at, which people you saw.
The privacy issue pointed that out too.
Well, with 2,000 pictures a day, you could easily have an app that ran them as a movie and let you blast through on fast forward or whatever - so you had that wine on Jerry's birthday, in the evening - let's say 100 pictures cover that event over two hours, that's nothng to sift through. Of course, you need to know approximately where to look, and the more info you had the better, but I don't see a problem here - I know the meal was in January around 8pm, so give me 8pm thumbnails from 1st-31st January. Okay, there's the day I'm after, now let's flick through and find that bottle of wine. Bada-bing!
You could also have a variant on the iPod's on-the-go playlist feature; if something interesting happens that you want to refer back to, tap a button on the camera (or use some other kind of trigger) and tag the relevant shots as a special selection that's marked in your browser app. Hell, stick in a pulse monitor and review those moments from 2005 that really got your motor running. Oh, that reminds me: this thiing really needs a lenscap.
You know those pictures that are a compilation of thousands of pictures? One could use these to do that. BTW, does anyone know of a program to make one of those collage pictures?
So by the time the attacker has stolen the camera, there's a mugshot of the guy waiting for you at your place when you get back to send to the police.
I wouldn't suggest that this be used as actual evidence to convict, btw.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Could this device be the next step in tracking criminals on house arrest, or tracking parolee where-abouts? What types of applications might be possible when you can tell where a person has been all day, or while they were on a work-release program? Could this provide law enforcement with further accountability than the 'ankle-bracelet'?
No shit. I once had a webcam on a bird's nest, and it would save 10K images/day. I wanted to find the pics of the eggs hatching and babies poking their heads out (lame, I know, but the women in Marketing loved it). I had some app that would display them in sequence as fast as it could load them, and I'd just let it run and watch for movement. Even so, it took about two hours to cycle through a day's pics, and I didn't have time left over to, um, take advantage of the good will I had generated.
In 2001 I paddled the Yukon from Whitehorse (Canada) to Emmonak (Alaska, at the mouth of the river) in a 17 ft. canoe. To document the experience without too much hassle, I built a solar-powered waterproof computer out of a Virgin WebPlayer (remember those?) and some assorted electronic parts. The machine was/is equipped with a VGA webcam, which took pictures with regular intervals or when ordered to do so (whichever came first). It could also do motion tracking, snapping shots of passing animals etc. It could also record sound if needed. All of that was stored on two 20 GB notebook harddrives inside the machine. I mentioned the project on /. in this posting.
Had I still had my webserver (...no broadband where I now live, in Sweden...) those pictures would be visible for all to see. The camera was attached with a velcro strip to my hat, or sometimes to the canoe. It contains a microphone as well, so it could also record sounds (a function I did not use at the time). The whole setup worked fine, right until a leak in the camera's waterproofing and a subsequent rainy week smudged the CCD sensor. Pictures were blurry after that...
Of course I'm not the only one who has done things like this. There is a lot of 'prior art' in this field.
--frank[at]unternet.org
I didn't see any reference to this in the first article (and as a good slashdotter, I haven't looked at the second, Microsoft one yet), but clearly to "zip through" 1000s of pictures, you need to store tons of meta-data for each one. GPS-like location for outdoors, trianglation based on 802.11 access points for indoors???, maybe you could enable yours to transfer a digital business card to other people's sense-cam at the push of a button, so another part of the meta-data would be who you were talking to.
Upload not only pictures but also meta-data to your PC at night and have software that generates a log of what you did that day. The privacy issues are a little scary, but (like video cameras today) you could just disallow them in buildings/situations you don't want to be photographed. Technology is just a tool... its how you use it... blah blah blah...
Its called Final Cut, where Robin Williams plays a man who after you die edits together the highlight film of your life for your funeral. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/ Tagline:Every moment of your life recorded. Would you live it differently? Hell I wouldnt be as naked as often ;)
Trix are for kids!
A better comparison would be Earth, by David Brin. In one tiny aspect of a huge book, America's growing retired population reclaims the streets by sitting outside with netcams aimed at anything interesting. Everything from jaywalking and youthful hijinks to car crashes gets recorded and submitted as evidence not by big brother, but by we the people ...
In Earth Made of Glass John Barnes writes about something called an emblok which was used to store all of a person's memories. Other people could also contribute their memories of a person. If you were killed, the memories could be replayed into the developing brain of a cloned spare. Over time, it would become you again.