The months of 2004 were halcyon days for those hoping to capture their entire existences digitally. Nokia was talking up
Lifeblog as a way to chronicle every action of every day, while Microsoft had a few
SenseCams floating around, snapping random images twice a minute to create a sort of slideshow of your daily tedium. Neither went mainstream, but Microsoft's option still has some legs, getting licensed by a company called Vicon and re-dubbed the ViconRevue. It now has 1GB of internal storage backing what seems to be a VGA camera sensor that can snap a picture every 30 seconds. At £500 ($820) they're currently intended for those studying Alzheimers and dementia, but a consumer model is due next year, and hopefully it will be affordable enough for those with memories but no government grants.
posted Oct 19th 2009 9:09AM
I may blog about Alzheimers but at least I don't have Alzheimers!
Please use this to film your fake rescue of your child from a home built spaceship, so you can get on tv. Life-blogging SenseCam?
what about when you are dumping or slamming, i dont want my weiner on there
I'm glad I'm not a kid 30 years from now when everyone has live streaming video necklaces. It will really take some guts to ask girls out when that happens. Do NOT blow it! Your dad WILL see it on YouTube!
Son, I am dissapoint
"Do NOT blow it"? Is that what she said?
$820? I thought I wasn't reading it correctly at first. Jeez, crazy.
-Lu Galasso
You are right. And these engadget guys couldn't even mention the price TWICE.
- Al Capa
It is I, LeClerc!
-LeClerk
don't worry, your Alzheimers will make you forget
Awesome. Instead of having to rely on brief twitter posts to read about how someone ate a sandwich or sorted their sock drawer, we can see what those incredibly interesting activities looked like from their perspective!
Yay for narcissism!
I really like the idea of a video cam that records everything that goes on in our life. However, the technology would be useful for personal use essentially ONLY when we have some effective mechanism to search through the years of video footage.
Or you could try making your own catcam for $30 (http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/pe_catcam.htm) and wear it yourself. Or pay $70 and get a video version that does 4 hours of continuous video (something this $830 camera from Microsoft should definitely do as well, but apparently doesn't).
There is definitely a point where you are sharing too much, and we passed that already. Please stop.
Perfect for vacationing/sight-seeing or when you want to rewind and prove to the wife that she's contradicting herself (and still get to sleep on the couch)!
There is a time laps garden cam available for $180. It's not overly large. I don't see why this piece of dung costs $800.
You can just use an old J2ME-running mobile phone plus some basic timelapse software. Would cost you less than $100.
http://code.google.com/p/lapse/
SenseCam does not just take time lapse photos every 30 seconds. It is continually scanning every second for interesting events to capture, e.g. person in front of you, a picture of each room you move into, food or drink in front of you, a sudden change in light level or movement , sound level or change in temperature. In this way a sequence of images is built up to view your day in a compressed mode. No viewfinder is needed as the very wide angle lens captures most of what is in front of person.
It seems like the consumer side may have more involvement with MyLifeBits out of MSR Cambridge.
Q&A with Gordon Bell
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139488/Q_A_Carrying_your_life_in_your_pocket?taxonomyId=16
More MSR news
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/ne/news.aspx#p=1&ps=72&so=0&sb=d&fr=&to=&fd=&td=&rt=&f=&a=&pn=&pa=&pd=
It is nice to see Microsoft and other companies finally doing something with this technology but in the intervening years I got bored of waiting around so just went ahead and developed my own "SenseCam" software for my cell phone. Works like a charm. You can check out some of the pictures at http://www.justinlloyd.org/category/sensecam/ and some of my experiences with it. Yes, you can get in to a situation where you share too much, and yes, it can record very embarrassing mistakes for years to come, so how long until we start self-editing and self-censoring even more than we do?
I can just picture the old people talking into the device... "HELP! I've fallen and I can't get up."