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Memoto Lifelogging Camera
- vibragiel 14y ago2000 geotagged pictures a day, every day of my life, automatically uploaded to their servers, and no word on how would one set up their own private server? Let me think about it... #not
- kiba 14y agoBuy it. Reverse engineer it, and hack it so it uploads to a private server. Release the code. Unless they had already provide this option.
- grogenaut 14y agoDCMA'd ya in one. Just like the new apple charging cable. SUCKER!
- jalada 14y agoI'm not sure why they wouldn't let you have the photos yourself instead of forcing you to upload to their server. They want to sell the hardware, not lock you in (I think?).
- dagw 14y agoThe profits from charging everybody a few bucks a month for a photo storage service should be much greater than the profits from selling hardware.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoLooks cool... but... Does this have a long-term future? Soon (I hope) we will all be wearing glasses with cameras in and I wonder whether that will render this obsolete?
- kiba 14y agoIs a Google Glasses is going to be unequivocally better in all aspect than a box or even a camcording box?
- alexchamberlain 14y agoWell, I have to wear glasses and the extra features, such as a heads up display, are very exciting.
- kiba 14y agoIt costs 249 bucks for the later batches and 199 dollars for the early version. Expensive. I guess I'll have to wait for product evolution to make stuff cheaper. On the other hand, the application for lifelogging is pretty long. An employed programmer(or indeed, anybody who makes money) should be able to justify the expense of 249 bucks no problem.
- mdonahoe 14y agothis is $250 plus a monthly fee. Though a programmer might be able to hack the software to intercept the photo uploads and just store locally.
- eik3_de 14y ago5 times overfunded in 3..2..1..
- forgottenpaswrd 14y agoThe good thing about being with someone is that : being with someone ALONE. Not someone analyzing what I did with my wife one month ago, where, how, why. The idea is not new, Justin started http://www.justin.tv/ http://www.justin.tv/ recording everything in his life with a video camera. I don't want anything I say or do being recorder by someone else(I know this camera only takes pictures, by now), and I don't want other people(smartphone manufacturer and the US government) to know what I did Thursday at 3:00 pm. One of the worse things about living in a small village is all people controlling what others do, gossip here and there. In cities people were free of other people trying to control them, with cameras everywhere and web social services it is becoming rural village again. It is big brother´s dream. In the future the government will use cameras on the street, face recognition and servers to track anybody at any time.
- true_religion 14y ago> The good thing about being with someone is that : being with someone ALONE Isn't this a case of if you don't like it... don't use it?
- mike-cardwell 14y agoYou don't get to choose if the people around you are using it.
- lmm 14y agoI remember a post from another thread saying that our experience of being able to go out anonymously in a crowd is basically a blip in human history. When you live in a village it's impossible to go anywhere (you still have privacy when you're actually in private) without all your neighbours knowing, and it'll be the same when this technology becomes widespread.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoMany of our current daily experiences are a blip in human history. I'm not concerned about how old the experience of relative anonymity in public spaces is. It's a good thing, that we should strive to keep.
- digitalengineer 14y agoDepressing. This is like that movie with Robin Williams "The Final Cut". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/ A total privacy nightmare. Your government is gonna love it though.
- xabi 14y agoSame as Black Mirror 1-03 "The Entire History of You". Very recommended BTW. http://www.tvrage.com/shows/id-30348/episodes/1065121884 http://www.tvrage.com/shows/id-30348/episodes/1065121884
- retube 14y agoYes, a great show. Very, very recommmended.
- digitalengineer 14y agoThanks! Gonna have a look at that.
- marvin 14y agoYeah, this is a really cool idea, but only if you have full control of your data. Ironic that they should mention "full control" as an argument in favor of storing the data on someone else's server. You're only a subpoena away from having every intimate detail of your life revealed to the authorities, unless you manage to turn the camera off whenever something potentially suspicious happens (this is also called circumstantial evidence).
- rorrr 14y agoThey would have to make batteries replaceable, since a product targeted to years of use. Their funding goal of $50K is ridiculous. This is a software + hardware project. $50K is nothing. Plus they need to pay royalties for using JPG once that project takes off.
- diziet 14y agoIf I am reading this correctly, the patent in question has been inactive since 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Patent_issues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Patent_issues
- diziet 14y agoThis is an idea that probably rests on their software and ease of use capabilities, as small portable cameras have existed for quite some time now in the $10-20 price range: http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Digital-Video-Novelty-Camera/dp/B006IFK5V0 http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Digital-Video-Novelty-Camera/dp... or http://www.amazon.com/Mini-30fps-chewing-shaped-camera/dp/B004Y3PH20 http://www.amazon.com/Mini-30fps-chewing-shaped-camera/dp/B0... The geotagging of events, plus all the wonderful image recognition and categorizing (plus automatically judging photos as interesting or valuable) are the selling point of this camera. It'd be pretty hard to get shots of yourself though, maybe they could introduce some sort of opt in feature where other users of this kind of camera that were in a close by position at similar times would contribute to your feed? (Or did I just invent Color?)
- ivanb 14y agoThis would be helpful as wearable surveillance camera. I can imagine retail workers, policemen and security guards wearing them.
- tisme 14y ago2000 pictures per day doesn't sound like much (a bit more than 2 pictures on average per minute) but this really adds up even at the resolution of this camera, they claim about 1.5 TB / camera / year. Uploading and storing that much data for a large number of users in a reliable and cost effective manner is a non-trivial exercise. So the big question is what their monthly fee is and I think this project should disclose those (projected) fees and not just the price of the device because it could very well be that those monthly fees will be the large component.
- terhechte 14y agoI guess I'd rather have less photo quality and less space requirements. For this specific use case, I guess 3 Megapixel would be sufficient, and then save it not as jpeg but in jpeg2000 or another wavelet compression, at best with a solid compression rate.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoThe images could naturally degrade over time too. Ie, older photos are compressed more. Although the process of fetching an image, compressing it, and replacing it, might be more trouble than the storage saving is worth. Could keep every nth photo as full resolution maybe.
- jonmrodriguez 14y agoYou probably just re-invented what the brain may be doing as our "memories fade": re-compressing (and culling) to free up space, with storage surprisingly expensive. :)
- joesb 14y agoI guess their killer algorithm is going to be on determining the "relevant" picture to be kept in full resolution.
- megablast 14y ago
- stfu 14y agoWouldn't it be easier to modify something like the already incredibly cheap (~$10) available key chain cameras? There are already quite sophisticated discussions on these out there http://www.chucklohr.com/808/index.shtml http://www.chucklohr.com/808/index.shtml.
- est 14y agoI have one of these, it's a pen which can actually write, but with 480p recording.
- duiker101 14y agoBut this has a social app! This is a kickstarter project! This gives you the amazing opportunity to upload automatically every single moment of your life to a server on which you have absolutely no control! But they will be marked as private so totally safe! /irony http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-information-to-10-minute-old-startups/ http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-informat...
- jonmrodriguez 14y agoFrom a hardware standpoint, completely possible. The problem is trying to write that code for a non-standard architecture. These cheap Chinese processors often completely lack even minimal documentation. See this great post: http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-March/002881.html http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-March/0...
- stfu 14y agoNever thought that these processors are somewhat the result of Chinese subsidies gone wild. Really worth reading, thanks for this.
- joesb 14y agoA benefit of all product in the market is that you don't have to modify existing product yourself. Most people just want to buy and use a product.
- stkni 14y agoI don't get it. I'm not going to wear this to work, partly because my boss would think I was a spy and partly because my work life simply isn't worth recording at that level of detail. So then I take it with me places on the weekends. But, I already take a high quality camera with me most-places (courtesy of my smart-phone) and it takes pictures at EXACTLY the right moment, it doesn't miss the shot because of a poor-angle, bad light, bad composition or bad timing. At least when it does, it's my fault. To me this seems way too niche to ever succeed. I expect I'll be wearing one though in a few years time :-)
- mdonahoe 14y agoCan you remember exactly what you were doing on Sunday Sept 30th at 5pm? That's what this is for. Remembering the inbetweens. The moments you forgot to photograph because you were too busy living them. Most of it will be junk, but so are most emails. The data is still worth having, for some people anyway.
- stkni 14y agoNo, and if I can't is it worth recording?!
- lmm 14y agoThere's some interesting psychological research that suggests "random" photos taken at fixed intervals are better at triggering memories than posed photographs.
- rplnt 14y agoJust don't forget to turn it off on your vacation... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/arma-iii-developers-charged-with-espionage-in-greece/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/arma-iii-developers-ch...
- zerostar07 14y agoI wish i was more qualified to identify the myriads of cliches in their video. Hipstery shaky 70s-ish looking nostalgic video, rounded edges, yellow plastic, heavy SLR. But really, this seems like a cool idea for a phone app, why the extra hardware?
- jonmrodriguez 14y agoWhy the hardware? Seriously? Try walking around all day with a full-size smartphone hanging as a necklace. People are going to think you're crazy. Miniaturization is the name of the game.
- SCdF 14y agoAs cool as this is, I'll be interested once we have always on audio, video and GPS, with-- while we're day dreaming-- a post-process that analyses the data and reduces it to a day summary complete with transcribed conversations, things you saw and people you met.
- erikstarck 14y agoYou can assume the Memoto team is having an ongoing conversation with the (Swedish) authorities discussing privacy issues for a device that only saves images. Adding sound and video moves the privacy concerns to a whole new level. Are we, as a society, even ready for such a device? Also, you add a lot of complexity both in terms of usage and in terms of manufacturing and support. Plus the battery drain.
- mike-cardwell 14y ago"All pictures you transfer to Memoto’s cloud service are stored encrypted. The pictures are only visible to you: only you can see them and only you can change them." Is this real client side encryption, or is it Dropbox/Hushmail style encryption where they can do a little server side trickery in order to obtain your encryption key if the US government compels them to? I'm just thinking how useful it would be to law enforcement if they could just specify a location, date and time and go through pictures taken there for evidence. I hate this whole idea. It's inevitable that it will happen, but I hate it nonetheless. You wont be able to go outdoors without being constantly recorded by strangers. My only hope is that the popular services manage the technology such that we don't end up with databases that governments, or organisations can read private data from.
- lmm 14y agoI think the best to hope for is the opposite: that all the databases are publicly available, so at least we have equal access, and high-ranking politicians are just as exposed as everyone else. The world is changing. When it's this easy and cheap to record everything that happens in public and put it in a searchable database, people will do it. You can't stop the tide.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoI still think the best to hope for is that only the individuals with the actual devices are able to look at the data. Can you imagine future potential employees being able to type your name into a web page, getting an image of you, and then through the magic of facial recognition, seeing a long list of geo tagged photos of you going about your normal daily life? Who you associate with, where you go, etc. We shouldn't support this project or projects like this unless we get full assurances that the privacy issues have been tackled appropriately. At the moment, we don't know how the encryption is done, so as far as we should be concerned, there is none. No encryption. As far as I'm concerned, with the knowledge we currently have of the project, if this project becomes big, this is worse than for example: The government installing CCTV on every street corner, which automatically uploads data to a central database that they can peruse at will. These cameras will be in and on private property as well.
- ericflo 14y agoI think this is a really cool idea, but it's still about 2 or 3 times too big for me to wear it. It's big enough that people will notice it and ask about it, which is enough to discourage me from wanting one.
- crucialfelix 14y agoThe life recorder is inevitable. I mean full video and audio. I've been talking about it for decades. The social and psychological shift is going to be huge. Are you self conscious when somebody is following you around taking pictures ? This thing will bug everybody out. The first adopters will be security and police (who already do it with their car based video). Then narcissists and people who want to have their own vanity tv show 247. And annoying tech dudes who wear it at parties. many people will realize how boring their lives look from the outside and they will stop wearing it because it's depressing. Anyway, the tech isn't the hard problem, it's the analysis, information overload and personal search engine industry. Many companies including my own are skating towards that puck.
- vitovito 14y agoWhat is your company working on? As far as I know, no academic research or even rumored corporate research is going into useful, consumer-oriented (meaning able to provide meaningful value to the user with minimal curation and/or improving their quality of life), management of life-recording amounts of video. Most aren't even touching audio. Audio recording is usually legally restricted under wiretapping laws. Video recording is even dicier, not just with laws varying wildly from state to state, but also with individual privacy and image rights laws coming into play. It's why all the researchers are sticking to photography, unless you're the military, when the rules don't apply to you. The only researcher who's done any work, as far as I know, into handling that much video and audio is Deb Roy, with his timeworms visualizations, and that's only because it was his own household that he was able to clear an IRB. And it's still not useful by my previous definition. You've been able to do all-day life-recording for under $1000 since the mid-2000s: http://www.eyetap.org/wearables/wear-hard-06/2006420.html http://www.eyetap.org/wearables/wear-hard-06/2006420.html and http://www.eyetap.org/wearables/wear-hard-06/2006423.html http://www.eyetap.org/wearables/wear-hard-06/2006423.html for mailing list posts I wrote on the subject. You can do it today for around $200, but the six years since I wrote those posts, we still don't have the tools to process that much data. I'd be interested in learning more about your work, and may be able to share some of my own.
- crucialfelix 14y ago
- fsniper 14y agoI believe people are going crazy. This kind of self privacy violations can not be true.
- hk__2 14y ago“To recharge the camera’s batteries, you connect the camera to your computer; at the same time the photos are automatically uploaded to Memoto’s servers” What? I can’t just keep the photos without putting them on Memoto’s servers ??
- leke 14y agoSoon everyone will be able to see you having sex.
- digitalengineer 14y agoI'd rather see someone create really, really disruptive technology like a "personal privacy bubble" I can activate when I choose to. Something that will auto-blurr and auto-jam all video/audio. THAT is something people would like. "Want to film me? I opt out!"
- hellweaver666 14y agoYou mean like for when you go to the adult book store?
- digitalengineer 14y agoLol, people still buy adult books in stores? How about all those CCTV camera's? The camera's in stores can even tell if you're male/female and your general emotion (according to the lines in your face). Question is: Do I even have the right not to be filmed? Somehow I think not... Apple did file a patent to disable iPhone video recording using lasers (to be used at concerts).
- mike-cardwell 14y agoOr a bar. Or a church. Or a sexual health clinic. Or a comic book convention. Or for a run. Or on a date. Or sunbathing on a beech.
- digitalengineer 14y agoThere are quite a few companies working on this it seems: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/405968/lights-camera-jamming/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/405968/lights-camera-ja... or http://news.cnet.com/2100-1009-5074852.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1009-5074852.html And a non-portable options is for purchase http://www.jammer-store.com/uv30-uhf-vhf-jammer-blocker.html http://www.jammer-store.com/uv30-uhf-vhf-jammer-blocker.html (no connection with this site).
- wtrk 14y agoIf anyone would like a lifelogging camera right now, you can purchase a Vicon Revue (rebadged/locked version of Microsoft's SenseCam): http://www.viconrevue.com/product.html http://www.viconrevue.com/product.html It has a "privacy button" that stops it from taking photos for a few minutes and records other information along with the images (like temperature, for example). Also, all of the images and data are stored locally on the device. Another lifelogging camera, with better specs, about to hit the market (Nov 2012 according to the register/buy page) is Autographer, from the Oxford Metrics Group: http://www.autographer.com/ http://www.autographer.com/ They are advertising 8GB of internal storage, so it would seem that they're storing the images locally too, though the device has bluetooth.
- tudorw 14y agoIf we are asserting that time is short and we lead fast lives, where will the time come from to review these images ?
- martinkallstrom 14y agoHi all, sorry to come late to this thread. I'm one of the founders of Memoto and a long term HNer. FWIW, Memoto would never have reached this stage without HN. Of course we are very happy about the results of the Kickstarter campaign. Personally I am also very happy about the healthy concerns raised here on HN, to continue to inspire us to never settle for mediocrity. We have a great team of engineers working on both hardware and software. It is a challenge to handle such a long tech chain but we feel it is manageable with the team we have.
- gallerytungsten 14y agoInteresting idea. Except for this part: "the photos are automatically uploaded to Memoto’s server." Are you kidding me? No option for just uploading to my own computer? This makes the whole thing a non-starter.
- jimmahoney 14y agoThe cloud model would seem problematic for this much data, given the bandwidth constraints of many users. For my DSL connection (3Mbps/0.8Mbps) I would need to saturate my outgoing bandwidth half of each day to upload 4GB. And I think that these numbers aren't far off from the global average. If this is going to be a viable product, I don't understand at why the developers wouldn't provide a local storage model. Without that, I for one would have zero interest in the service as described, particularly given all the other concerns of handing over this much intensely personal data.
- trendspotter 14y agoAwesome. Found it 30 minutes before hising posted it here. Note to self: Submit everything cool to HN.