SenseCam is watching

Frank Arrigo links to Microsoft Research's overview of "SenseCam".

I've wondered for a while about when we will have devices like this. I'd ultimately love a wearable device that records the audio-video of my life every moment I'm awake and archives it for future retrieval. I hate missing those little moments of my kids lives when they say or do something classic and I don't have my camera on them. I've to be able to sit down at the end of the day and review in fast-forward the days events, tagging moments as I go "oh yeah, that one goes into 'classic moments'." Then you could pull those up later on "open classic moments file".

I've also thought something like this might simplify the legal system. Imagine having a handshake agreement with someone that both of you capture on AV. It would make future dispute resolutions less complicated.

How would these things work? Will memory compression continue to improve until we get to a point where you will be able to store a day's worth of AV on a wearable device? Or will the device continually back-up the AV wirelessly onto a server somewhere? Will we be able to perform some sort of speech-to-text recognition on the AV that enable us to search for certain segments by using keywords (show me that conversation I had with the police about the burglary")?

I hate running into people I haven't seen for a while and forgetting what my last conversation with them was about. I'd love to be able to watch a video of it before I see them the next time.

Anyway, cool to see MSR is working on such stuff. I imagine pure R&D on this kind of thing is going on in other places, but I don't know where.