Read Online Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by C. Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell - Free Book Online
Authors: C. Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell
window shown on my PC screen, and the history of my music playback. We logged every search. I bought a GPS and started loading my location history into MyLifeBits.
We even experimented with recording radio and television shows. Digital video recorders (or DVRs) such as TiVo were just coming out, and we wondered what it would be like to keep everything when it came to TV. We built our own DVR and set it up with nearly two terabytes of storage—more than twenty times the capacity of the early DVRs. If you think your TV program guide is big, try wading through more than a thousand shows, all of which are actually interesting to you. And radio was a totally different experience. We recorded lots of National Public Radio shows, including Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, and news. We played the audio back on a Pocket PC, so it was like a cross between TiVo and podcasting. Jim Gemmell learned that he fast-forwarded through all but fifteen minutes of a typical news hour.
But I quickly lost interest in TV and radio because such shows would soon be archived and available on demand. Having your own copy is not so special if you can just have it streamed to you through the ether anytime you please. It’s still worthwhile to have your lifelog make a record of what you watched and when, but not to copy the program itself.
By October 2003, I still wasn’t wearing the walnut-sized camera strapped to my forehead that Bush had predicted. But Lyndsay Williams, a colleague from the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England, had come up with something even more interesting. She called it the SenseCam. About the size of a cigarette pack that hangs from a cord around your neck, the SenseCam is a fisheye camera that takes pictures automatically. When it detects a change in light level it presumes you’ve passed through a door or otherwise changed your setting, and snaps a picture. When its passive infrared sensor detects the appearance of a warm body, it snaps a picture of whoever just came into view. An accelerometer lets the SenseCam know when to delay taking a picture to avoid motion blur. And of course, you can point the SenseCam and take photos at will rather than waiting for it to take the initiative.
Lyndsay once confided that one reason she developed the SenseCam was to find her misplaced eyeglasses. By scanning SenseCam images, she can find the last place she put them down.
One of my favorite examples of how the SenseCam enhances life comes from Cathal Gurrin, a lecturer at Dublin City University in Ireland. Cathal set out to perform a year-long experiment, wearing the SenseCam during all his waking hours. When the year was over, many people expected him to be glad to stop. In fact, he wouldn’t give the SenseCam back. Cathal began wearing the SenseCam daily in June 2006 and, as I write, has worn the SenseCam for almost three years, acquiring over three million photos. Gurrin has a collection of his favorite photos rotating on a digital photo album on his desk which he shows off with the enthusiasm of a new parent with baby pictures. “Look,” he says, “here’s a picture of the first moment I met my girlfriend—not that I knew she’d become my girlfriend at the time.”
A fun thing to do is to play back all the SenseCam images from a day or a week in rapid succession, which takes just a few minutes. Talk about your life flashing before your eyes! It’s an amazing feeling to see your life on fast-forward like that.
I enjoyed taking the SenseCam on walkabouts with my GPS. I could later reconstruct my travels on an animated map, with pictures taken along the way to tell the story. The best series I did was an eight-hour trip along the Great Ocean Road in Australia and through a treetop walk in a rain forest.
My SenseCam has captured many special moments, especially at parties, lunches, and conference exhibits. I have a sequence of when I was admitted to the hospital for heart bypass surgery in July 2007. My
We even experimented with recording radio and television shows. Digital video recorders (or DVRs) such as TiVo were just coming out, and we wondered what it would be like to keep everything when it came to TV. We built our own DVR and set it up with nearly two terabytes of storage—more than twenty times the capacity of the early DVRs. If you think your TV program guide is big, try wading through more than a thousand shows, all of which are actually interesting to you. And radio was a totally different experience. We recorded lots of National Public Radio shows, including Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, and news. We played the audio back on a Pocket PC, so it was like a cross between TiVo and podcasting. Jim Gemmell learned that he fast-forwarded through all but fifteen minutes of a typical news hour.
But I quickly lost interest in TV and radio because such shows would soon be archived and available on demand. Having your own copy is not so special if you can just have it streamed to you through the ether anytime you please. It’s still worthwhile to have your lifelog make a record of what you watched and when, but not to copy the program itself.
By October 2003, I still wasn’t wearing the walnut-sized camera strapped to my forehead that Bush had predicted. But Lyndsay Williams, a colleague from the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England, had come up with something even more interesting. She called it the SenseCam. About the size of a cigarette pack that hangs from a cord around your neck, the SenseCam is a fisheye camera that takes pictures automatically. When it detects a change in light level it presumes you’ve passed through a door or otherwise changed your setting, and snaps a picture. When its passive infrared sensor detects the appearance of a warm body, it snaps a picture of whoever just came into view. An accelerometer lets the SenseCam know when to delay taking a picture to avoid motion blur. And of course, you can point the SenseCam and take photos at will rather than waiting for it to take the initiative.
Lyndsay once confided that one reason she developed the SenseCam was to find her misplaced eyeglasses. By scanning SenseCam images, she can find the last place she put them down.
One of my favorite examples of how the SenseCam enhances life comes from Cathal Gurrin, a lecturer at Dublin City University in Ireland. Cathal set out to perform a year-long experiment, wearing the SenseCam during all his waking hours. When the year was over, many people expected him to be glad to stop. In fact, he wouldn’t give the SenseCam back. Cathal began wearing the SenseCam daily in June 2006 and, as I write, has worn the SenseCam for almost three years, acquiring over three million photos. Gurrin has a collection of his favorite photos rotating on a digital photo album on his desk which he shows off with the enthusiasm of a new parent with baby pictures. “Look,” he says, “here’s a picture of the first moment I met my girlfriend—not that I knew she’d become my girlfriend at the time.”
A fun thing to do is to play back all the SenseCam images from a day or a week in rapid succession, which takes just a few minutes. Talk about your life flashing before your eyes! It’s an amazing feeling to see your life on fast-forward like that.
I enjoyed taking the SenseCam on walkabouts with my GPS. I could later reconstruct my travels on an animated map, with pictures taken along the way to tell the story. The best series I did was an eight-hour trip along the Great Ocean Road in Australia and through a treetop walk in a rain forest.
My SenseCam has captured many special moments, especially at parties, lunches, and conference exhibits. I have a sequence of when I was admitted to the hospital for heart bypass surgery in July 2007. My
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