Life Logging Cameras
With all the buzz surrounding wearables this year, it seems like every other article online has something to do with wearbles, a new product or criticism of the market in general. But seeing a link to an article about Stephen Wolfram discussing how to make wearables useful seemed like it might contain some new/interesting insights.
Reading through the article I was reminded of the life logging cameras that got funding through Kickstarter a while back. I guess these are technically 'wearables', collecting data in the form of photographs of your day. Most of these cameras take multiple photos a minute, and there's something about the excessive number of photos one would end up with at the end of the day that, and how one would navigate and iteract with them, that makes for a really fun design challenge.
I was first introduced to these cameras when I saw Richard Banks speak about a project at Microsoft Research in Cambridge where they developed a life logging camera called the SenseCam.
SenseCam from Microsoft Research
Initially developed as a 'personal Black Box accident recorder', they found that looking through the collection of images that the camera took throughout the day actually helped in recalling the events of the day in a more vivid way. They found novel and pretty meaningful applications for the camera. In his talk, Richard Banks showed how they used these cameras with Alzheimer's patients as a way to help them remember the events of their day.
It was later released, not through Microsoft, and at a pretty high price point. In the last year or two, there have been a couple of similar life logging cameras announced. The two most popular, the Narrative and the Autographer, are smaller and clip onto your body to make using them throughout the day easier. I hadn't read that much detail on the specifics of each until today and wanted to capture some of the similarities and differences. Below is a breakdown of both cameras.
The Narrative is about 1.5 inches square with a 5MP camera, GPS, accelerometer, magnetometer and 8gbs of storage. It takes two pictures every minute, and the storage and battery are enough for 2 days worth of capture. The team has built a cloud based app that stores all your photos and allows you to access them in browser or through an iPhone/Android app. The camera is $279, but the service costs $9 a month though.
Narrative camera
The Autographer is about 1.5 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall with a 5MP camera, GPS, accelerometer, magnetometer, temperature, colour sensor, and PIR sensor (passive infrared sensor). The Autographer has a pretty good number of added features, like Bluetooth to pair with a phone, a button to manually take a photo, ability to switch between different modes, and a small OLED display on the front. From the description on their site, it looks like the Autographer uses data from its sensors to decide when to take a picture. Assuming it would be based on movement or change in location. The software that comes with it also looks to have a more robust feature set. You can browse your photos through multiple views (calendar v.s. stream) with the sensor data displayed alongside the photos. You can also great animated GIFs and stop motion videos from a group of photos.
Autographer camera
Aside from having a collection of your day, It'd be great to see what other kind of meaning can be pulled from a collection of photos of your day. Maybe something that Lev Manovich will look into as it seems to fit into his current research around cultural analytics.
