Taking The Photographer Out Of Photography
from the humans?--bah!--who-needs-'em? dept
With all the stories (and conspiracy theories) about backup brains and Microsoft’s “mylifebits” projects, it looks like everyone is experimenting with ways to record your life. Now it’s time to add HP to that list – though, their project is more focused on creating a visual record. While they say their system is more about replacing the snapshot process, you could see how it easily fits into these larger projects. It appears that they started with the premise of an automated camera. You could go to a party, with this wearable device somewhere on your body, and the end of the night, it would have automatically taken a bunch of pictures, adjusted the images and put them into a nice album for you. Realizing that was a bit too ambitious, they’ve scaled back just a little bit. Now the idea is that the camera would constantly record everything around you, but would respond to certain commands. So, if you were looking at something, and thought it would make a nice snapshot, you would say so, and the system would figure out the best way to snap the picture. It would also do things like take a series of images if you turned your head slowly, and automatically turn them into a panorama shot. To be honest, this sounds like the visual complement to the prototype backup brain from Accenture. That system records all the sound it hears in a constant loop, but if it hears you say “that’s interesting” or “hi, my name is…” or any other such “indicator” it carefully files away the sound around that statement. This way it automatically tries to record the audio portions of the most important parts of your daily conversations. Mixed with this visual system from HP (that they want to hide in your glass, or through a button), and you could have quite an interesting record of your daily life – with no one realizing it.
