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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.""
"...but you're also going to get a load of junk"
If by "a load of junk" you mean "a lot of pictures of people pointing at your goofy-looking glasses and laughing," then you're absolutely right.
"you're not going to miss any moments, but you're also going to get a load of junk."
wow I guess they're right... most of my life is a load of junk.
But what if you gave this camera to those guys on the MountainDew or Surge commercials who only do exciting things constantly?
HP Revolutionizes the boring webcam technology by fusing it with reality TV. Story at 11.
Ride the snake
Looks like the dawn of times when one would have to decide what NOT to capture.
*sigh... life's tough
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Hmm...intesting idea... need some big batteries..
Gargoyle?
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okSounds alot like the Microsoft Wearable camera. anyways i think its a cool idea. Sometimes i dont feel like taking pictures manually and maybe it will get more 'real life' photos instead of having everyone poised for them.
Sadly, all I would get are many many screenshots of slashdot.
I Love Alberta Beef
Now I'll have to sift through 1000s of google responses when I search for anything containing nothing more than someone unimportant opinion, with 10,000 pictures of their boring life scattered throughout. Oh wait, blogging already does this, it's just going to get worse with the pictures to document things no one really cares about.
On the serious side, this is, in my opinion, the resolution of a problem that doesn't exist. It's very cool, it just isn't a very needed product.
Jamon
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Great. My GF is already pissed that I don't delete enough of the stupid pictures I take. I tell her "I keep everything, just in case." She would murder me in my sleep if I got one of these.
TW
I like to call them "eyes".
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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!
Sure, it may create some privacy issues...if it's storing it at some central HP or public database. 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?? I'm not trying to troll, but why is this such a big deal?
Is it just me, or is the paranoia level going up these days...
And yes, you can pry my mechanical Yashica and my black and white films from my cold, dead fingers...
This comment does not exist.
Seriously, the only people geeky enough to want this are just going to be watching slashdot all day anyway.
Jamon
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
First we had to have automatic sinks because we were too lazy to turn them on, then we had warning labels on toys with a circumference of four inches, then we had an idiot who sued McDonalds because it made her fat... Now we're so lazy we have to have a camera we don't press a button on? That's sad... Just plain sad...
Why do you always wear those damn glasses when we make love ???
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); }
This is by far, the lamest, most annoying, and totally stupid april fools story that's been posted yet. I mean, glowing hamsters, cold fission, W bush on viagra, those are all things easy to believe, but a camera that you wear?? Now come on!!
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
I wonder, at times it seems technology gets a pass, just because it is complicated.
Though the article mentions privacy concerns, it is stuff away between a half-dozen other headings. All technology is nothing more than tools. It is the context that gives the tool its meaning. And in this case, the social context of the tool should very much be weighed against the abilitity to "never miss an important moment." Who defines important? And who defines what *should* be recorded, and what should not be recorded? The social implications of all technology deserve more consideration than they currently recieve, I think.
Interestingly, in the same article, he predicted the CD Rom, the Internet, Wikipedia, Color Photography -- well before the first dry cameras or the first computers.
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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Now I won't have to figure out how to control my shoe-cam when walking behind skirted babes. However, a Kilt Avoidance System would be nice.
Table-ized A.I.
Imagine what you could do with that kind of snooping power.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Where's the privacy problem? Let only people you trust see things they're allowed to remember. That's why the difference between "public" and "private" places is so important, and why the right to control access to our private places is essential to privacy, and to our participation in society - rather than alienating us from it.
--
make install -not war
This connection makes it wonderfully poetic to see this invention coming from HP.
This is not a new idea. This DejaView Camera keeps a buffer of 30 seconds.
Deja View's Camwear Model 100 captures everything you see, records it in a buffer so you never miss that moment! Simply press the record button and the last 30 seconds of video with audio will write to a removable storage device.
The Deja View Camwear Model 100 easily clips to your glasses or hat is constantly buffering 30 seconds of what you experience while wearing our product. With one simple press of a button, the camera will record a 30 second video with audio in 320X240 CIF in the latest MPEG-4 technology! The file is saved to a SD Memory card (64MB provided) upgradeable to 512MB (optional). The file is easily stored and transferred to a computer or when played in Video out mode, can be recorded directly through a VCR or viewed right on your TV screen! USB connection for computer or remove SD memory card and view it in an SD reader (not included).
This will be all fun and games until the first subpoena.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Seeing the great success of his other preditions (calculators, internet, etc) I think this _is_ the future of digital photography.
Actually, I think this shows up in David Brin's "Earth". He called them "Tru-Vue Goggles", or something similar.
Two tangential comments:
Perhaps the glasses could monitor the
wearer's brain activity and only store a
frame when it detects a strong reaction to
what's being viewed.
There was a public outcry when photography
was invented, when Goerge Eastman marketed
it to the public, when X-rays were discovered,
etc. The uproar over these is nothing new.
http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm
...although having a camera snapping away constantly isn't exactly "Photography" IMO.
Basically, if you're in a public area you can't stop someone from photographing you (though you could ask not to be) nor can anyone stop you from taking pictures in public areas. This includes buildings and "people/street watching"
$cat
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
If you record more than half of your life, well, there just isn't going to be time to sift through it all before it's over...
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
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....
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")
I can see this device being extremely useful in certain situations:
If a police officer had a device like this when conducting an arrest or a stop the device would be beneficial for everyone involved:
1) If Officer does anything illegal the defendant has proof
2) If the defendant says something or does anything, the police now have proof.
In this context the only person with cause to worry is the individual doing something illegal (either police officer of member of public).
besides, a camera that's on all the time would give uterly useless crappy shots! photgraphy is about composition, light, technique...
Initially, the idea put me off horribly. Yes, I'm a bit of a privacy nut and all that. But then I thought - I would *love* being able to watch footage of my girfriend and me taking our first walk six years ago, back when we weren't quite boyfriend and girlfriend yet but somehow the next day we were.
Then again, if I'd worn a camera like this that day... I don't think the next six years would have happened the same way. So in reality you probably would get junk and junk only, because for those moments that are worth preserving you would switch the damn thing off without a second thought.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Hurray for me...i officially added nothing to this discussion
--I swear, it was a case of isolated idiopathic hemibalissmus
have hit the nail on the head.
TiVo doesn't just record everything; it keeps a sliding buffer. Same should apply here. In fact, just after I got mine, I thought how useful it would be for something like this to be mounted in one's car (kinda like those the cops have in many "wildest police videos gone wild" clips) -- you could automatically get the plate number of some jerk who hits and runs; you could prove you were not at fault in an accident; and so on.
As for wearing an odd pair of glasses to get the effect, I dunno. But ideally, you'd want to get footage all around you, not just what you're looking at (seems like half the usefulness of such a system would indeed be the ability to go back and catch something you missed the first time -- again, like TiVo).
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Considering that the next paragraph of Bush's article reads:
The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many pictures as would result from its use.
it's clear that he didn't predict this! (Actually it was already apparent from the paragraph originally quoted, which after all refers to "a hundred exposures"...)
Sorry, I just have little patience with exaggerated claims about such predictions...
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.
"Oh, and here's the first time I got beat up at school for having a dorky camera strapped to my head!"
This sounds alot like what Prof. Steve Mann and EyeTap have been experimenting with for a long time. They were featured on the TechTV show "Nerd Nation" not too long ago. Real interesting stuff.
...oh those should be fun with this on... Just try not to look down that much.
a video camera?
the only thing limiting to what you can capture is the tape and battery.
you use a camera for capturing a still moment. you use a video camera for capturing an entire event.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Umm.. not quite. Vannevar Bush did not predict color photography.
Color photography was invented in 1850 by Levi Hill. Commercial color prints first appeared in 1903 with the Autochrome process. Kodachrome was widely available in 1945 when Bush wrote that article.
The Aliens style helmetcams are not new, just the wireless networking to make it work.
It would have some uses in law enforcement. Perhaps it would stop the police from randomly beating peoples teeth out.
Or maybe one on every car.
But pitching it to average joe as wearable computing is just dumb.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer