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HP Experiments with 'Always On' Camera
An anonymous reader writes "Hewlett-Packard researchers in the U.K. are working on a camera that's always on, recording everything you see and letting you go back later and decide what's actually photo-worthy. Raises some serious privacy questions. But as an HP researcher notes, "If your wearable camera is always on ... you're not going to miss any moments, but you're also going to get a load of junk.""
Somewhere, sometime, somebody will catch something on par with the Zapruder film, or the Rodney King tape, and it will spark a cultural revolution, and then Microsoft will make you pay a DRM fee to decode your OWN LIFE!
just have the camera always on, but discarding anything over a minute or two. Then when something happens you want to keep press the button and the last two minutes are saved, plus what happens as you watch.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
imagine everyone walks around with a little camera/mic clipped to their shirt as common as having a phone in your pocket, disputes would always be on video, ufos would never be missed and blackmail would be plentiful, its gonna get partially like that like it or not, camera phones keep getting more popular and their memory is getting larger and larger, even if you dont have them always on in a couple of years almost everyone will have a camera within reach 24/7. Privacy issues are gonna go mental super-hardcore!
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Imagine what you could do with that kind of snooping power.
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It'd be nice if that camera had a "shutter button", much like your typical film camera or digicam, which instead of signaling the device to take a picture, actually marked that particular time as interesting. Later on you could go back to those shots and pick frames at or near those points. Another feature: Add audio capture so you can whisper to the camera when you take those shots, so you can make notes about the shot.
This connection makes it wonderfully poetic to see this invention coming from HP.
deal with 365 DAYS worth of video just to take the 10 minutes I might even remotely [care] about.
More like you're wearing a TiVo that retains the last 30 minutes of what you've seen and after you've seen something interesting, you capture it and put it in a kept recording.
For parents, it would be like having Ender Wiggins' monitor on your children.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
What about a different model. One that doesn't keep the record of all you see, but just, say, last 30 minutes. So, you saw something intersting, it's gone, but you tell it "make snapshot of last 5 mins" and it records last 5 minutes on permanent record. Say, a lot was going on, but you catch a breath and record last half a hour. And if you know a lot WILL be going on, just tell it to start recording right away.
I guess this not only will save a lot on media costs, it won't raise so many security concerns (all data records are opt-in, not opt-out, only unlike with normal camera - with ability to record what happened already, not only what is going to happen.
Think 1000 lines long shell scrollback.
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Badge Cameras are a project by H. Keith Henson of space colony and anti-Scientology fame, to put cameras into police badges, hopefully preventing future Rodney King incidents. The HP scheme sounds similar.
I wonder if this will advance facial and object recognition? Would be kind of cool to be able choose a picture of a person and see every other image they're in. Even better, thrown in object/character recognition, search for "When was I on State Street" (based on viewing street sign), or "show pictures of my car".
I predict that if this becomes popular, peer to peer networks will pop up which will allow me to register my friends so they can see any pictures that include them. Very neat!
I also predict there's gonna be a shortage of tinfoil hats and face masks in the near future....
If it's just recording it to some internal storage drive, and then you move the footage to your hard drive or somewhere else, then what's the problem?
That's precisely the problem. I don't know about the quality of the photos this camera can produce. I'm thinking the resolution will be lower than what you could achieve with a regular digital camera due to the automated nature of the camera and its limited storage space, but that's irrelevent. The fact is, a photo can be taken of a person without that person's consent or knowledge.
There are a lot of girl-watching hobbyists out there who have been aided by digital cameras and camera-cell phone combos. Some upload the images to newsgroups or to commercial sites catering in upskirt candids. I've had my photo taken by complete strangers on the streets, the beach, and in nightclubs. I personally don't mind some guy "enjoying" a photo of me in the privacy of his own home, but it's reasonable that other women would have a problem. My privacy concerns are with the photo being uploaded to a public site without my knowledge or permission, especially if said site had a sexual or voyeuristic tone. My biggest privacy concern however is with abuses of the technology by law enforcement agencies and the government, or just nosy neighbors who enjoy spying on others. There is also the possibility that the photographer has a more nefarious scheme; that I'm intended to be more than a pretty face and nice legs for one's personal candid delight. The point is, I'd have no idea what the photographer's intentions were, nor would I even know I was being filmed or spied on.
This would work if you had a trigger to mark "on the spot" ranges that are interesting. That way when you get home you won't have to search weeks of non-events to find a cool shot.. Sort a "that was funny" button, or perhaps more appropriately for
An episode of PBS's Scientific American Frontiers back in April of last year featured an MIT Media Lab student named Brian Clarkson who built this exact same thing himself. He wore it like a backpack with fisheye lens cameras on the front and back. One of the more interesting things he was able to capture and re-watch was the first time he met his then current girlfriend.
You can watch the episode online.
(The part featuring Clarkson is titled "Never Forget a Face")
At least if they go to pull the camera out she has a chance to say "No thank you - I prefer not to have my picture taken".
To which I can say "Sure, whatever *click* *click* *click*." If your wife is that offended by having her picture taken she shouldn't go out in public, because there isn't, and shouldn't be, a damned thing she can do about somebody taking her picture. Well, I guess with the obvious restriction of harrasment/stalking, but we aren't talking somebody following her around all day taking her picture. We're talking lots of people ending up with her in the background or walking by, as they record (for some odd reason) their journey to work that day.
There just isn't a privacy concern here which doesn't already exist with today's camera technology. And it is already illegal to break into somebody's private abode to take pictures of everything... so what's the problem?
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
I remember attending a panel discussion at a Leica School of Photography seminar in 1973, photographer Robert Heinecken declared that in the future there would be always-on cameras, sort of like eyeglasses, with a massive memory storage (he suggested holographic memory because that was the cutting edge of research at the time). You'd be able to pick out any moment of time and pull up a stored photo of what you were seeing at that moment. The other panelists disagreed vehemently and said it was impossible, it would never happen.
I think that should be, "no one will knowingly be allowed in". Once these cameras are small enough to be undetectable, things are going to get very interesting...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.