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The 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.

The 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 ago
What 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
  I'm just forming the actual startup now. I'm not yet interested in audio/video, but that's eventually where the puck will be (so that's where we should be skating to - if you're familiar with that metaphor). But in fact I think what's externally visible about a person's day to day life isn't that interesting. Especially if he's staring at a computer all day. A lot of quantified self stuff I actually find quite dull and useless. I'd be more interested in seeing my blood sugar levels Humans have an intense world of internal description and that's what I'm interested in working with. Describing your life is a way to actually frame your own feelings and sense of purpose. My own life has been dramatically improved by the software I've written that really just tells me what the f•¶§∞ I've been doing and let's me visually compare that to what I want to be doing. As I get rolling here turning into an actual product then I'll be more public about it. Definitely interested in talking with people though. I'm especially looking for datavisualization people.
- crucialfelix 14y ago
  http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57527545-71/samsung-tries-to-patent-the-story-of-your-life/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57527545-71/samsung-tries-... Samsung patent: "The analysis unit analyzes the log information collected from the information collection unit and decides at least one topic representing the user's daily life information." meaning cell phones also Gordon Bell's book http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-09/pl_print http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-09/p...
  - vitovito 14y ago
    Gordon Bell's testbed was outstripped by the possible data collection years ago, and he's admitted he rarely did anything with his archives after collecting what he did, serving more as a reference library for others. That Samsung patent sure is interesting, though. The US filing of March 31, 2012 is interesting, too, as I started work on something similar in February (I see their foreign patents are from last year). You might be interested in this (rather large, dated, from May) slide deck PDF of what I'm looking into: http://s3.amazonaws.com/vitorio/Automated%20Storytelling%20May%202012.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/vitorio/Automated%20Storytelling%20M... Feel free to contact me, links are in my profile.

vitovito 14y ago

What 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
I'm just forming the actual startup now. I'm not yet interested in audio/video, but that's eventually where the puck will be (so that's where we should be skating to - if you're familiar with that metaphor). But in fact I think what's externally visible about a person's day to day life isn't that interesting. Especially if he's staring at a computer all day. A lot of quantified self stuff I actually find quite dull and useless. I'd be more interested in seeing my blood sugar levels Humans have an intense world of internal description and that's what I'm interested in working with. Describing your life is a way to actually frame your own feelings and sense of purpose. My own life has been dramatically improved by the software I've written that really just tells me what the f•¶§∞ I've been doing and let's me visually compare that to what I want to be doing. As I get rolling here turning into an actual product then I'll be more public about it. Definitely interested in talking with people though. I'm especially looking for datavisualization people.
crucialfelix 14y ago
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57527545-71/samsung-tries-to-patent-the-story-of-your-life/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57527545-71/samsung-tries-... Samsung patent: "The analysis unit analyzes the log information collected from the information collection unit and decides at least one topic representing the user's daily life information." meaning cell phones also Gordon Bell's book http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-09/pl_print http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-09/p...
- vitovito 14y ago
  Gordon Bell's testbed was outstripped by the possible data collection years ago, and he's admitted he rarely did anything with his archives after collecting what he did, serving more as a reference library for others. That Samsung patent sure is interesting, though. The US filing of March 31, 2012 is interesting, too, as I started work on something similar in February (I see their foreign patents are from last year). You might be interested in this (rather large, dated, from May) slide deck PDF of what I'm looking into: http://s3.amazonaws.com/vitorio/Automated%20Storytelling%20May%202012.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/vitorio/Automated%20Storytelling%20M... Feel free to contact me, links are in my profile.