a looking-glass book

thesis points for bolas

sharing/publishing

no one has dealt with a ui that effectively allows quick and simple review of the data glut created by wearing a camera for a long amount of time. in order to truly share and expect yourself or others to enjoy and review the material one captures, reviewing it must be quick and effecient.

content

no one is thinking about first-person recorded video as a narrative construct. the ability to create movies without sets or actors, from a first person view, without editing or cutting the video creates a completely different language of film than we have previously known. coupled with the serialization of day-to-day life, the dramatic/soap opera elements are undeniable and could provoke a new genre of personal cinema.

front ends

it seems that flash has to load an entire movie into itself befor eit can deal with frames within the movie. and it doesnt handle movies very well. as in, 500 meg, 1 gig movies are out of the question.

so no flash front end it looks like. at least for any sort of manipulation of the movies. maybe as some sort of interface to flip through.

so now im back to digging through max/jitter to pull scene stills, then all that will go up on the server as stills. so it looks like dhtml for the stills might still be the best display ive got.

i know something sexier can be done, but right now i really just need a front end.

figures

lessons for today:
1. when zemekis, director of such notable films as 'back to the future', 'polar express', 'castaway' and 'contact', stops in with cbs to film some work _and_ then singles your project out of the group to talk about the work you are doing: try not to sound like an idiot.

2. also, try to make sure your equipment is actually working. as you have a camera crew, lights and zemekis all standing over your desk as you sweat bullets trying to to get everything working again.

i dont know if ill be cut out of not (though word has just come up that they are coming back up for some pickups, so maybe i can redeem myself).

more in a bit.

releases

it occurs to me that by posting videos of my life on here, by releasing them from any sort of true copyright, im giving up the rights of my life.

kurt doesnt find this as odd as i do. but then it isnts his life.

griffen powertrip

ten minutes later, i have thrown down 55 dollars to have one of these in my hands by tomorrow.

i got it in silver. and will you blieve you can set it to pulse when the computer is asleep? now ive got visual indication if im not recording. sweetness.

hardware

there have been a number of interesting articles on /. recently relating to my thesis.

first up is the tapeless digital camcorder for your pocket. the review isnt great but it does bring up the whole 'one piece of hardware' idea again.

the other one just ran - thinking about the snitch cam. the article referenced is actually disappointing; it rehashes the same things that have been said 100 times. i suppose i really need to start working on a better version.

it does though link to a tiny camcorder which can be picked up for about 130 bucks. it runs on a flash card and aa batteries. its about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

i couple of weeks ago, i would have picked one up. now i can think of several reasons not to: windows only codec, files must be transferred to computer later, flash card fills up, crappy/uncontrollable conpression and quality.

though im not in love with having to carry my powerbook around with the isight, at least 1. the quality is mine to set and 2. it records straight to the drive in quicktime.

the last article was today and focused mainly on hardware again - the joypad that became a rotary controller. this is interesting because of a link over to griffen's powermate. this seems to be a nice little dial/button that goes in via usb and can be set to do 'something' on the machine.

this might be the best/most attractive button idea ive seen yet. if i can configure it to mark moments down (timecode/clock), this looks better than using a mouse or some other joystick to do the same thing. at 40 bucks it isnt outrageous, maybe i can find it cheaper.

iam uis

some sketches for possible uis for dealing with the data glut im working on creating.

for now, ill prob be trying to build a few of these in max/msp/jitter. would like to move it to flash frontend with php/asp backend at some point. just dont want to spend the time ramping up on flash unless i have to.

back to developing.

#2 is the one from last semster i have already built in max with urt. #4 is the one i thought i would use. #3 or #7 look like the most likely ones in some form right now.

thoughts or ideas?

re-blogged

woah.

here and here. weird.

i hate the reblogging thing personally. but at least im getting exposure. now if i could just find a flash developer.

bueller? bueller?

pics of iam in nyc

i walked around after the conference with the camera on. my friend meg and i went to a street fair near times square. then my sister and i walked around the dumbo festival out in brooklyn.

meg just sent me some pictures of my lowtech setup, so im passing them on. as soon as i get this video compressed, ill be posting it as well.

also

i am the 'camera on head' guy today. other than mann. we are the only ones recording with mounted cameras. and jim was nice enough to point me out to the group.

granted there are 2 sensecams, marc davis is using his cell phone for video and other people are using video on their digi-cams.

but im the video kid.

the end, its over.

more mann

he states that the new cyborg age will force honesty. that two-faced people, dishonest people, liars will not be able to cope in the new age of recording everything.

one more from carpe

no one here, not a single person other than me, is thinking about using pov 24/7 video for entertainment. no one is thinking much about narratives even. or even really that other people would want to see them. that has been brought up at least. but its mentioned in a family sense, not as 'wow, i wish i could see the videos of lincoln's life' kind of thing.

thats insane to me. every use listed is very practical, very...selfish.

this is a huge strength for my project.
this is a great reason to be in the film school.

(also, the question just asked is how to access the data created. and amazingly, no one has a solid answer. one more strength for me. least i have picked good areas of research for contributions.)

random carpe notes

. looks like i might get a deja view to experiment with after all
. spoke with a recent phd grad from media lab. interesting to hear his thoughts and experience
. big props to dr drucker, who is sitting next to me as i write this, for walking me around when the conference started.
. steve mann, who actually offered to be on my thesis committee, invited me to his conference next year (hopefully to present) and offered whatever help he could.
. ive got video of almost all of the sessions, but its small and im not sure of the sound quality. i have to shrink it further to get it on the blog, so im not sure it will end up being worth sharing. once i get cleaner installed, ill see what i can eek out.
. met the eyeblog guys and have some media of myself from them. was cool to talk about their work, their experiences and their publicity (they left early to go get interviewed by 'good morning america'.)
. it looks very very likely i will get my hands on a sensecam in the future to play with narratives on it. exciting to know that i will be able to work with a variety of hardware systems this year. being able to explore video/audio vs. video vs. stills is great.
. this was an amazing day. so nerdy but so compelling to me. i feel caught up, educated and linked up. i have felt behind since i got sick, but just this one day here had made me feel on top of my game. i am now part of the community. i am ready.

session 4

Memory Cues for Meeting Video Retrieval - Alejandro Jaimes, Kengo Omura, Takeshi Nagamine, Kazutaka Hirata

Total Recall: Are Privacy Changes Inevitable? a position paper - William Cheng, Leana Golubchik, David Kay

meeting review tools, how can we leverage video to get info out of it? video is never used now to review what happens in meetings (events).

this first presentation seems very geared, like the business one in the previous session, focused on making video and content and computers into personal assistants.

there seems to be a drive to push the desktop computer away from desktop and more towards a shoebox. a collection of data that you pull up. memex memex memex. i wonder if this is to be the future of computing.

again, this goes back to the 2 uses for this stuff - personal assistant vs sharing experiences.

the front end for this demo is in flash. and it seems mostly graphical, to be used for business meetings. employee faces and layouts of rooms are shown. you drag images into the 'search box' to get info back. an interesting way to search on a limited dataset.

it also shows the camera location when you play the video back and you can pick scenes and speakers. and seating arrangements.

pretty cool, but somewhat niche.

they are doing basic motion tracking for a lot of the actions. also cool, but then there will be someone complaining that we are being taught to behave a certain way to get the system to function. i think its needed on this first step, but id like to see if it could be gotten away from down the road.

again, these guys are ignoring audio. its weird that audio and video are being worked on so independently. be nice when they each get to a good point and someone matches them up. i like the idea of searching the video of my life for quotes people said. now thats some good stuff.

---

holy crap.

this lecture, the second one, is from usc/imsc/isi/cs.
their project - total recall
ill have to talk to her after her presentation. this is incredible.
i might have found my lawyers and info. wow.

i had to fly across the country, to find out someone is working on this literally in my own backyard. and they want to record everything in someone's life.

this could be a match made in heaven; they still seem to be lacking the entertainment content.

excuse me while i try not to make loud, happy noises in my seat.

and scott (or anyone) - did you know about this project?

mann brings up nonwillful blindness. (encrypting video with a key that is held in part by numerous people who hand it over as long as mann is not under duress. forces the system to subpenoa the entire universe to unlock a video)

didnt post much about this one, mainly because its local to us and ill be speaking to them soon i am sure.

session 3

Personal Chronicling Tools for Enhancing Information Archival and Collaboration in Enterprise - Pilho Kim, Mark Podlaseck, and Gopal Pingali

Uniscript: a model for persistent and incremental knowledge storage - Adorjan Kiss, Joel Quinqueton

thanks to firefox crashing, i lost my post for these two sessions.
im a little lucky, as these two drifted away form my work and talked about organizing data/text in business and philosophical ways.

increased productivity and relational database organization...
it was decent and interesting but not my cup of tea.

sorry this seems short, ive lost the notes forever and am frustrated by this meager portion.

session 2

Minimal-Impact Audio-Based Personal Archives - Daniel P.W. Ellis & Keansub Lee

Passive Capture and Ensuing Issues for a Personal Lifetime Store - Jim Gemmell, Lyndsay Williams, Ken Wood, Gordon Bell and Roger Lueder

bolas, this audio lecture is for you. pretty cool, but he just said he still doesnt have the killer app for it yet. true that. it also seems like that darpa proposal is all over the place. i would be surprised at this point if there was anyone in the room who didnt apply for it. mr. fisher, i want to hear more.

ive got jitter installed now, so i think it might be time to look at making a patch and then exporting that out as an exe for systems. its not webbased, but that might be ok. esp as i dont have a flash developer yet.

anyone know of one who wants to work on a cool video ui for free? i cant promise money, but it is a cool cool thing they would be helping create. i can almost promise some level of exposure, based on the people's hands i was just shaking in regards to my project.

so he is just recording audio on an archos 20 gig drive. so he analyzed the audio at 1 minute intervals instead os something like 10ms. for the 'diary app', he is looking more at background noise instead of foreground.

i ought to talk to rachael and see if i can draw up a survey for people once they wear the system to see if/how their behavior changed. thats going to be important.

im also worried that the isight's mic isnt good enough. and it sucks in low light. but still.

also, the huge cup of coffee i just took in is kicking in. wow. no more sleepy tripp.

---

sensecam wants to filter at capture time. so you get the flipbook thing. hm. drucker really thinks the isight is good, as opposed to the stills sensecam does. i think the sensecam can be a basic, bad framerate video camera. but if im not getting one to play with, its moot.

as a side note, the device is small. think gba sp size and shape. not that bad. no way to tag important moments though.

davis agreed i had to have it. i dont disagree, but to be honest, i keep forgetting this isight is on my head, given that, i dont know ill remember to hit a button. i want to wave my hand for important moments, but so far, it hasnt crossed my mind.

there are 12 sensecams right now. guess ill go beg during lunch. cant hurt. (oh and ken wood has said that he will put me in touch with the ex-producer from seacrest. so between that and bridget's help at ca, i think ill be able to explore reality tv a fair amount.)

sensecam people are doing a cross-cultural privacy study. he says that other cultures are just now getting used to the idea of privacy. important to remember that we arent the only culture and other ones function much differently.

rich, the coder of mylifebits, suggested looking for 'web recorders' for the mlb function i like of saving out every page you visit. unlike history hound, google desktop, etc etc, it doesnt use the cache. thats the real important part. so ill have to dig around later.

man, mylifebits is so hot. i love it. but its almost too much. i hope that a more useful/lightweight version can be built. itll make me want a pc again.

mlb thinks the killer app for pic and video is the screensaver. boy oh boy, i hope i can convince them they can do more. cause its neat, but so limited. esp when you dont have segmented video.

breakout

5 minutes after that post, dr. drucker walks me around a bit. meet the sensecam folks, walk to get coffee and actually meet and speak with marc davis (weird timing after me mentioning him in my last post) and then speak to the deja view folks.

looks like, all around, that the isight/powerbook combo is the way to go. i need to find a way to tag important moments, but it doesnt seem like there is a better device. ive got some more people to talk to today, but after today, im going to feel mostly committed to my hardware.

thats good news. i figure if all these people, the top people in the world looking at what i am looking into cant suggest better things than this, it prob isnt available. deja view says again, in 8 months, they will have the system i want. stupid stupid stupid. i wish i could get a promo unit now. but they seem intent on being annoying.

now the next lecture has begun.
this is already a freaking amazing day.

session 1

Efficient Retrieval of Life Log Based on Context and Content - Kiyoharu Aizawa, Datchakorn Tancharoen, Shinya Kawasaki, Toshihiko Yamasaki

A Layered Interpretation of Human Interaction Captured by Ubiquitous Sensors - Masashi Takahashi, Sadanori Ito, Yasuyuki Sumi, Megumu Tsuchikawa, Kiyoshi Kogure, Kenji Mase, and Toyoaki Nishida

wow.
everything that is being talked about is right on target with what im doing. the gps, annotation, i even just saw a drawing that was exactly what kurt and i drew last semester for perry. whats amazing is no one is talking about ui or entertainment.

things seem to fall into 2 categories - memory/personal assistant and then more open, shared content delivery systems. most people seem to see this as the former, not the later. i just dont think that is how it is going to play out - the networked life is too strong now.

---

a video summarization system was just suggested.
its the wrong approach, nothing against the guys talking about it. but why would you want to throw data out? isnt a better interface one that allows you to set the level of detail? go for the powers of 10 - where you can zoom in and out. simply creating a highlight reel is nothing but auto-editing. hello, marc davis. but no thanks, its not the way to go i think.

ive got to find out what some of these people are using, hardware-wise. many are using off the shelf stuff.

interesting - they synced up 4 videos by timestamp and are playing them all at once. they are all pointed at each other, so its nice. very time-codish. but i dont know what the real use of it is.

hm. maybe there is something important to think about the camera position with pov. no, not position, identity. ground. mounting a camera on a child is different than a baskeyball player. how does that type of thing inform the narrative and the character?

seems people are using units like this to help reconstruct space. either by using multiple cameras or (as mann did)) composite a tracking shot into one image.

mann pt 2

boy, this is fun - post after post.
interesting, mann is suggesting a pair of usable digital glasses, which could donm 'anything' - prescription glasses all the way to ar, with facial recognition in between.

he tested his eyetaps at gambling places and got away with it. 'if youre electric eyeglasses are working well, you should be able yo wear them without being discrimanted against.'
thats just rad.

the video that is playing not is work he doing with a phd. he can use the glasses to block out billboards and augment them with other stuff.

mann has been been involved with 'possibility of copyright infringement.' cyborg law is actually being taught as a class. and so now he wants to wear the camera for safety, as opposed to partial. streaming the content has 'saved his life' he thinks.

the talk just finished. holy crap it was good.
ill post the video in a few minutes.

questions:

wow, he claims he must wear this - he has 'wrecked' part of his brain and needs the system to function properly. and thats how he gets around legal issues with his lawyer.

someone just asked about the 1:1 map question. he kinda glossed over the answer, just that he has done some work and its an issue.

his nice eyetap glasses cost him about 500,000 to build. so while he just kinda slammed 'lipstick cameras mounted to a pair of eyeglasses', the odds of me getting one is more than slim.

he explains the mediated world and how his eyetap is removing the advertising, etc.

mann's talk

im recording it, but the size is small and the file is still going to be large.

ill post it later, but its funny to have mann reference joi ito's moblog. kids, it really is a small world after all.

carpe 2004

im at the carpe conference today in nyc. sweetly, i got a book of all the white papers being presented today. some really sweet stuff. at first, i was overwhelmed and was worried my project was going to retread ground, but there seems to be nothing being done yet with a good ui and entertainment. so i win on both counts. ill update through the day; i also plan on video recording a bunch of it. there are going to be people around wearing sensecams, ill be sporting the isight and steve mann is presenting. so wearable computing/lifelogging is in full effect today. nerd on.

(also, i saw roger zimmerman from imsc here for the immersive media talk that is happening today in this same building. again - its a small world. i dont think he saw me though. or he did, but i dont think he realized it was me. because really, why would he expect a student worked to be at this conference on the other side of the country? still fun.)

serialism?

so im reading 'dark tower 6' right now, with 7 in the mail as of tomorrow probably.

im reading it. ive been reading them as they came out since before the third book. what does this mean though, really?

kurt has just started reading them. comparing notes in some sense has been fun, but he hasn't make it to book 2 yet. and the difference between 2 and 6 is enormous.

but it got me thinking, as usual. as with my comic books, there is something here. something that no longer happens. it happened with serial novels like 'the shadow' (i found, one day, like 200 shadow novels in txt format), with 'star wars' (i have most of the novels from 94-99). it has happened with comics since 1934 (right? im too lazy to check my nerd knowledge that '34 was when action #1 came out. but im 90% sure here).

if king died (in 99 or whenever) and someone else picked it up, would i keep reading? obviously questionable, but at first thought, yes, i would keep reading.

its the story, right? not the author.

think about this for a moment.
just do me the favor. stop reading, close your eyes and really think.

think about stories vs authors vs time.

theres something there and i cant put my finger on it. but its important. it creeps into popular culture from comics to soap operas to books to news.

how do we separate the narrator from the story in our modern life.
gah. theres something here, if i could grasp it.

anyone?

i am cool!

from will, over im:
"because you are so awesome, I need to send email to you all the time"

there you go.