

 New camera promises to capture your whole life  - araneae
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17992-new-camera-promises-to-capture-your-whole-life.html

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TrevorJ
I've wanted something like this for a while, but with audio as well.

Thing thing I've come to realize is that it must be an integrated system that
is automatically indexed and searchable, tagged by date, time, location as
well as having speech recognition and face detection in order to be truly as
useful as it should be.

I think the ideal device would also have a 'bookmark' button that indexes
sections you want to be able to find later on - very handy for remembering
names, faces, etc.

I also think there should be a 30 second rolling frame buffer so that you can
hit 'record' and capture five minutes of full-motion video starting 30 second
earlier so that you can fully capture important conversations and the like.

All of the tech exists, it's just not been integrated in an intelligent way as
of yet which is a real shame.

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gwern
> Thing thing I've come to realize is that it must be an integrated system
> that is automatically indexed and searchable, tagged by date, time, location
> as well as having speech recognition and face detection in order to be truly
> as useful as it should be.

Absolutely. But do we need those systems to exist _before_ we start life-
logging? As long as the data is available, we can always go back and then
index. As it is, it looks like the recording capability will be there long
before the software is polished to perfection. If people wait until the
software is perfect, then every day they wait is a day they'll never be able
to put into the database.

> I also think there should be a 30 second rolling frame buffer so that you
> can hit 'record' and capture five minutes of full-motion video starting 30
> second earlier so that you can fully capture important conversations and the
> like.

Short-term optimization. The real goal is just default full-motion video;
collect everything. The long-term storage space is essentially here already:
you can right now buy 1.5TB for ~100$ (see
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152175)
). The problem is on the collection end - I mean, a fish-eye camera with 1gb
for $800? How much is a 16gb flash drive these days, 30$?

Instead of hacking around the limits, let's just do the right thing: a small
video camera hooked up to a couple dozen gigabytes of Flash.

How much? Well, I've heard that a minute of H.264 480 x 272 is about 3.5mb,
let's call it 4mb. Recording sleep is useless, so 4 * 60 * 16 = 3840; 3.8 gigs
per day means that even a basic flash drive would suffice for multiple days of
video, and that we fill up our 100$ 1500mb hard-drive in ~394 days, or more
than a year.

(I keep wondering: is it really that difficult to have a small video camera,
that all these researchers keep using still cameras? Why don't we have easy
life-logging _now_? As you say, all of the tech exists.)

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ams6110
Why don't we have easy life-logging now? I don't get why you'd want to do
this. Sorry I just don't get it. Why would you want to record your whole life,
especially on a pendant-cam that would be bouncy and pointing at something
irrelevant half the time.

If a lot of people would want something like this, I must really be getting
old and out of touch.

I guess it might appeal to the types of people who keep diaries or journals
now. I'm not one of them, and neither is anyone I know. Do you keep an audio
record of your whole life now? That's been feasible for a long time. Why not?
What about video would make you start?

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gwern
> Why would you want to record your whole life, especially on a pendant-cam
> that would be bouncy and pointing at something irrelevant half the time.

Family videos are bouncy and pointing at something irrelevant half the time as
well.

> Do you keep an audio record of your whole life now? That's been feasible for
> a long time. Why not? What about video would make you start?

Omni-directional mikes would pick up too much; directional would be
inconvenient to aim. Video is vastly easier to navigate, since we think
spatially and visually - how do you scroll through an audio recording? With
video, you get feedback as to where you are temporally, especially if there's
movement from place to place; with audio, you just randomly fastforward hoping
to get nearer where you want to hear, if you can even recognize progress
towards or away from the clip you want. (An example: I have a video of a
boardwalk, versus audio, and I want to look at an encounter. Will it be easier
for me to find that encounter if I can look at the video, or if I just have to
listen to random ambience & chit-chat?)

Further, video picks up written material, it will pick up gestures and body
language of speakers, and, incidentally (and importantly for the hard-of-
hearing, like me) makes spoken language _much_ clearer because you can do some
lip-reading.

And remember the practical uses thought of for lifelogging; how would an audio
recording help you in traffic court? Some background noise, a screech, a honk,
and a thud is worthless. An audio recording might pick up your child's first
word - but not also his first step, like a video would.

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khafra
I like sousveillance and exocortex enhancement in general; and the attempt at
capturing intelligently in specific. But this seems a little underambitious
for the price--just 1GB of memory? No automatic, regular backups by wifi or
EDGE?

~~~
stcredzero
Wireless would be a great addition. Just automatic WiFi detection and
upload/deletion would make using it seamless for most people. Disable the
audio, if there is any, and I'd just wear it _all the time._

I would love something like that. I'm tired of people doing _shitty things_ to
me and ones I love, then getting away with it with barefaced lies. It doesn't
happen often, but it does happen. My girlfriend was just rear-ended by another
driver. She even got their license plate, but the police decided it wasn't
worth following up, possibly because she was confused by the make of the car.
She just doesn't understand that stuff.

I've been physically threatened, had local bureaucrats fictionalize tests,
been in accidents where the other driver was doing some preposterous passing
on the right-side by speeding over parking spaces, had police who kept
interrupting me before I could finish sentences but then claimed I was being
rude -- all these are situation where people just lie after the fact and get
away with stuff. I'm the one who tells the truth, and yet I am the one that
gets shafted. I am tired of that!

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th0ma5
Whole life? If I had one it would involve quite a lot of things that this
camera wouldn't capture.

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thorsview
"Final Cut" with Robin Williams depicts a future where all life moments are
recorded.

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chaostheory
I guess Big Bro is coming soon as electronic jewelry

