Today in class, one of the things we talked about was the SenseCam being developed by Microsoft. This is an appealing idea to me as a photographer and obsessive data-hoarder. The idea is that you wear the camera (the example was on a lanyard, but that's not essential to the core concept) and it takes periodic photos. It also has options to take photos based on changes in sensor inputs, like accelerometers and ambient noise sensors.
I looked around and this is not a new idea. There's a CNET article from 2003 that talks about an HP project called "Casual Capture." It was based around a frame buffer that would store the last 30 seconds of visual information and, on some cue, process it and store it.
"You say, 'Something has happened, I'd like to remember that,'" said Phil Cheatle of HP Labs' digital media department. "It allows you to take part in the event instead of hiding behind the technology. The challenge is selecting what's interesting automatically."This is a very interesting proposition. Obviously the hard part is figuring out what the most useful part of the 30 second frame buffer is to store. Simply storing all of it for later, manual processing is impractical. Having too much information is worse than not having any, in this case.
Another interesting paragraph was one that proposed more advanced automatic image processing:
The imaging software would also recognize when a sequence of shots could best be presented as a video clip, and would transform a slow movement of the head into a panoramic image, by stitching a sequence of related shots together.The project seems to have fallen off the face of the earth without producing even a prototype. The Microsoft product is a very good successor, picking up the torch. However, the second paragraph of the CNET article describes a device that is more advanced than either the SenseCam or how the SenseCam is described in the rest of the article. Clearly, it seemed to be an impossible goal at the time, but four years later it doesn't seem so far fetched.
Casual capture is HP's term for a method of taking snapshots that involves a minimum of effort on the part of the photographer. Ideally, the consumer could don an always-on, wearable camera, visit an event such as a party, and afterwards find that the camera had automatically selected and cropped the most memorable images.This kind of extremely smart documentation device is, I'm sure, ready to be made in the next few years. With a minimal amount of human influence, the device would automatically document and possibly share an event.
Of course, there's the same concerns that are raised whenever some kind of camera becomes ubiquitous. These tend to flair up at the introduction of a new technology and quickly dissipate as it becomes commonplace. Occasionally something will spark a controversy and cause greater attention to the use of the technology for a time, but the trend is towards acceptance.
If enough people wore one of these, it's impossible to predict how society would change. On the one hand, there would be a rich social history available at little to no cost of human time. On the other hand, it would produce a constantly surveillant and surveiled society. Everyone would be watching everyone else, and a great deal of personal information would become public knowledge.
But, with Facebook, Google street view, CCTV, and others, we're already well on the way there and most people don't seem to be alarmed, or even notice that it's happening. As privacy disappears (as is the trend), so will privacy concerns. Society will adapt to whatever new technology it is given, as long as it serves a purpose.
