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For me, this bypasses the emotional aspects of taking a photo. When I take a photo of the Eiffel tower, I am capturing the moment of when I visit the Eiffel tow

For me, this bypasses the emotional aspects of taking a photo. When I take a photo of the Eiffel tower, I am capturing the moment of when I visit the Eiffel tower with my family. In the future, when I look at the that Eiffel tower photo, I will re-create the feeling of _when_ the photo is taking as it serves a reminder.

onion2k 12y ago
Without trying it's hard to know, but it's actually possible that this gadget would be more emotionally engaging. When you take a picture, even just a snap without bothering to frame it or get settings right, you're detached from the moment - you're physically and emotionally engaged with the device rather than the environment. With a gadget that could automatically gather a set of photos from the internet that matched the location, time of day, weather, direction, etc that you were experiencing at the time you could, theoretically, go for a walk around a city without having to interact with anything other than the people you're with, being completely in the moment and engaged with them the whole way, and still have a pictorial journal of the trip. It wouldn't be impossible to automatically superimpose pictures of you and your friends in the images, correctly matching perspective and lighting. Whether or not that would actually cause the memory to be stronger or not is hard to say without testing it, but most memories are remembered wholly incorrectly anyway so that might not matter.
- mikeash 12y ago
  You made me think of a different sort of device that could be pretty cool. First, you'd need to come up with some way to automatically judge whether a picture is "good" or "interesting" with some sort of reliability. That's probably hard, but maybe doable now. If possible, take a large picture and crop it down to something interesting. Then, just leave a camera running continuously. Put it on your hat or hang it from your neck or something. Automatically save all the "interesting" shots. Then you have your pictures, but have been able to pay attention to what's going on around you rather than to the camera.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    That would be interesting. I think it's what the likes of Narrative are trying to do with the Clip device, but they just take a shot at regular intervals rather than trying to be clever about working out what's good algorithmically. It probably wouldn't be that hard to do based on motion rather than vision if you can make a few assumptions, like 'people still relatively still to look at interesting things' and 'when people are facing each other they want to remember that scene'.
- ddmf 12y ago
  It would be interesting to study that effect - use this device on a day trip, then on another use a standard (phone) camera. A year or so later, look back and see which evokes more of a memory. This would be subjective, unless you get wired up and/or stuck in an fMRI.
3rd3 12y ago
Carrying that thought further, you would basically need a high-resolution 3D video recording of our entire planet, captured by a network of nano bots. Then a maybe 13-dimensional vector (position, direction, up direction, time, focal length, aspect ratio, Instagram effect...) would suffice to describe any photo.
- pivo 12y ago
  You forgot to put his family in the photo.
  - 3rd3 12y ago
    Well, that would be captured too.

onion2k 12y ago

Without trying it's hard to know, but it's actually possible that this gadget would be more emotionally engaging. When you take a picture, even just a snap without bothering to frame it or get settings right, you're detached from the moment - you're physically and emotionally engaged with the device rather than the environment. With a gadget that could automatically gather a set of photos from the internet that matched the location, time of day, weather, direction, etc that you were experiencing at the time you could, theoretically, go for a walk around a city without having to interact with anything other than the people you're with, being completely in the moment and engaged with them the whole way, and still have a pictorial journal of the trip. It wouldn't be impossible to automatically superimpose pictures of you and your friends in the images, correctly matching perspective and lighting. Whether or not that would actually cause the memory to be stronger or not is hard to say without testing it, but most memories are remembered wholly incorrectly anyway so that might not matter.

mikeash 12y ago
You made me think of a different sort of device that could be pretty cool. First, you'd need to come up with some way to automatically judge whether a picture is "good" or "interesting" with some sort of reliability. That's probably hard, but maybe doable now. If possible, take a large picture and crop it down to something interesting. Then, just leave a camera running continuously. Put it on your hat or hang it from your neck or something. Automatically save all the "interesting" shots. Then you have your pictures, but have been able to pay attention to what's going on around you rather than to the camera.
- onion2k 12y ago
  That would be interesting. I think it's what the likes of Narrative are trying to do with the Clip device, but they just take a shot at regular intervals rather than trying to be clever about working out what's good algorithmically. It probably wouldn't be that hard to do based on motion rather than vision if you can make a few assumptions, like 'people still relatively still to look at interesting things' and 'when people are facing each other they want to remember that scene'.
ddmf 12y ago
It would be interesting to study that effect - use this device on a day trip, then on another use a standard (phone) camera. A year or so later, look back and see which evokes more of a memory. This would be subjective, unless you get wired up and/or stuck in an fMRI.

3rd3 12y ago

Carrying that thought further, you would basically need a high-resolution 3D video recording of our entire planet, captured by a network of nano bots. Then a maybe 13-dimensional vector (position, direction, up direction, time, focal length, aspect ratio, Instagram effect...) would suffice to describe any photo.

pivo 12y ago
You forgot to put his family in the photo.
- 3rd3 12y ago
  Well, that would be captured too.