There is a certain someone here at Digital Lifestyles who records everything – and I mean everything. He even records conversations with me. Whether or not he listens to them afterwards is a different matter, but he archives everything. When I saw the SenseCam this morning, it was clear that it’s his Ultimate Gadget.
With an accelerometer, passive IR detectors, light sensors and thermometer and wide angle-lensed camera, the SenseCam isn’t next year’s mobile phone, it’ a wearable device to help people with memory problems or assist obsessives in blogging their entire day.
The SenseCam has been developed by Microsoft Research Labs in the UK, and will be trialled at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.
The device captures 2000 images a day onto its 128mb Flash memory, and all sensor data can be fed to a system like Microsoft’s other archiving project, MyLifeBits.
MyLifeBits can then organise the data so you can go over the days events, or perhaps work out how you got into that lap dancing bar in the first place.
Future plans for the SenseCam may include heart rate monitoring or other physiological metrics – and no doubt there will be some military applications along shortly.
SenseCam
MyLifeBits
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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