One of the classic objections was that we couldn’t afford to store the many gigabytes - possibly hundreds of gigabytes a year! - such a practice would generate, but right now you can buy 1 terabyte for <$50. And there’s no end in sight to whatever Moore’s law has been governing hard-drives over the past decade or two.
But how is one to record it? That seems to be the rub. All the storage space we could want, all sorts of new formats like WebM or Dirac or x264 to store the videos in - but what camera generates the data in the first place?
We don’t care about sleep time, so we don’t need any more than 16 hours or so of recording a day. We can probably get away with 12. Even 8 might be enough (to record yourself on the job - or off). An encoded compressed video might be 1 megabyte a minute or 60 megabytes an hour, but let’s be generous and assume 15x worse than that, or about 1 gigabyte an hour. So perhaps 16 gigabytes.
16 gigabytes of Flash costs $40 or less. So that’s not an issue either.
And presumably optics and microprocessors are very cheap given the incredible popularity of web cameras, digital cameras, digital camcorders and whatnot over the last decade.
But for all that, I can’t seem to find a mini-camcorder which will record even 8 hours and be a useful lifelogger!
Looxcie costs an absurd $200, and has no more than 4 hours battery life
Flip MinoHD costs a far more reasonable $70 but only gets 2 hours of battery life; the other Flips do little better
the IRDC250 uCorder is $90, possibly better video than the Looxcie, and perfect - except for its 2 hour battery life
the Video Clipper is similar to the uCorder but claims better battery life & to be just $44
Am I wrong? Are there existing products? It seems to me that it ought to be perfectly possible to take something like the uCorder, slap in $110 of batteries, and get it up to 8 or 12 hours’ life. But I have yet to find such a thing.
Recording lectures at university. Especially on math and compsci courses, where the lecturer is demonstrating long sequential chains of formal reasoning, missing even a single step may be enough that you won't be able to follow any of the rest. Having all the lectures recorded and re-viewable would be a great help, especially on the courses where there isn't a specific course book and therefore there's no single written source from which you could independently study.
Remembering and sharing funny stories. It frequently happens that someone tells an anecdote that I'd like to share, or does something funny which I'd like to be able to pass on. This would help remembering those, at least if the lifelogging device supports a "tag everything recorded during the last 45 seconds under 'funny' kind of feature".
Keeping a record of past conversations. I keep logs of all the IRC and IM conversations I have, as well as saving all of my e-mails. Most of what gets logged I don't return to, but every now and then I'll want to check on the details of what someone said and will do a search to find it. To be useful in a life-logging context, a relatively accurate voice recognition software ran automatically on the video would be useful.
Saving emotional moments and good memories. A while back, I ran across the recommendation that at the end of each day, you should write down three (say) good things that happened to you that day, or that made you feel good / happy. The next morning or whenever you're feeling down, review the list to feel good again. This has worked moderately well for me, but I often feel too lazy or forget to write things down at the end of the day. It would be much easier if I could tell my lifelogger to tag the most recent video under 'happy', and then automatically review the 10 (say) most recent things tagged 'happy' at the press of a button.
Reverse engineering emotional arguments and disagreements. Occasionally either I or somebody I'm interacting with might get upset, not because of any factual disagreement, but because someone said or did something pushing subconscious emotional buttons. Going through the conversation in my head afterwards, I'm often able to pinpoint the things that caused an emotional reaction, and bring the previously subconscious triggers into conscious awareness. Having an ability to review the argument when in a more objective frame of mind could help deconstruct the triggers further.
Fast-forward everything I did during the day, look at how much time I spent on various things, figure out if I could have been more effective somehow.
There are probably more, these are the ones I could come up with right now.
Are people in practice really so tolerant of those who want to record them constantly? Unless I'm absolutely forced to be in the same room with someone who does it (or, of course, if I specifically want something to be filmed), I would insist that one of us must leave, no matter what. I wouldn't even trust them that the damn thing is turned off when they say it is. (And if done secretly, I would consider it a voyeuristic offense against my person, effectively an act of war.)
I see taping lectures and other public events as an entirely normal thing. However, the idea that someone would want, or even tolerate, to be taped during private emotional moments and in situations where funny stories are told and passionate arguments made honestly baffles me. (With a few traditional exceptions like taping family events for sentimental purposes etc.)
The old idea of lifelogging seems to be a reality now. It has the potential to be quite useful, and not just in distant contrived scenarios like cryonics or being recreated by an AI.
One of the classic objections was that we couldn’t afford to store the many gigabytes - possibly hundreds of gigabytes a year! - such a practice would generate, but right now you can buy 1 terabyte for <$50. And there’s no end in sight to whatever Moore’s law has been governing hard-drives over the past decade or two.
But how is one to record it? That seems to be the rub. All the storage space we could want, all sorts of new formats like WebM or Dirac or x264 to store the videos in - but what camera generates the data in the first place?
We don’t care about sleep time, so we don’t need any more than 16 hours or so of recording a day. We can probably get away with 12. Even 8 might be enough (to record yourself on the job - or off). An encoded compressed video might be 1 megabyte a minute or 60 megabytes an hour, but let’s be generous and assume 15x worse than that, or about 1 gigabyte an hour. So perhaps 16 gigabytes.
16 gigabytes of Flash costs $40 or less. So that’s not an issue either.
And presumably optics and microprocessors are very cheap given the incredible popularity of web cameras, digital cameras, digital camcorders and whatnot over the last decade.
But for all that, I can’t seem to find a mini-camcorder which will record even 8 hours and be a useful lifelogger!
Am I wrong? Are there existing products? It seems to me that it ought to be perfectly possible to take something like the uCorder, slap in $110 of batteries, and get it up to 8 or 12 hours’ life. But I have yet to find such a thing.