Feb 19, 2007
Some notable moments in recorded life
Recent progresses in miniaturization and storage capability have made it possible to record, access, retrieve, and potential sharing, all the generated information of a user's or object's life experience.
Two of the most important projects in this area are Lifelogs (initially funded by DARPA, then killed by the Pentagon in 2004) and Microsoft MyLifeBits
I am fashinated by how these new technologies could radically change psychotherapy and, more generally, how they could fundamentally affect our life.
In this article entitled On the Record, All the Time, Scott Carlson thaces the story and the implications of the introduction of LifeLogging. In the article I found a list of some notable moments in "recorded life":
1900s: The Brownie camera makes photography available to the masses.
1940: President Franklin D. Roosevelt begins recording press conferences and some meetings.
1945: Vannevar Bush, a prominent American scientist, predicts a time when scientists will be photographing their lab work and storing their correspondence in a machine called a "memex."
1960s: Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson record meetings and phone conversations for posterity, which later provides hundreds of hours of programming for C-Span.
1969: The microcassette goes on the market and becomes the voice-recording medium of choice.
1973: An American Family, documenting the domestic drama of the Louds, is the first reality-TV show.
1973-74: President Richard Nixon releases the Watergate tapesjust some of more than 3,500 hours of conversations that he had recordedwhich leads to his resignation.
Late 1970s: Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, begins dabbling in wearable computing.
Mid-1980s: Fitness nuts are wearing stretch pants and leggings, along with wristwatch-sized devices that measure heart rate and blood pressure. The heart monitors can cost $200 or more.
1991: The first Webcam goes online.
Mid-1990s: Cellphones, digital cameras, and the Internet become commonplace.
1995: Gordon Bell, a computer engineer and entrepreneur, gets involved with Microsoft Research and begins work that will lead him to record various aspects of his life for the MyLifeBits project.
1999: Microsoft Research invents prototype SenseCams, cameras that hang around the neck and continuously snap pictures.
2000: Scrapbooking has a renaissance, leading to new retail stores devoted to a hobby industry now worth $2-billion.
2003: MySpace debuts. 2004: The Final Cut, starring Robin Williams, describes a future where memories are recorded on implanted chips. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency drops a lifelogging project amid a furor over privacy. A workshop on the "Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences" convenes at Columbia University.
2005: YouTube appears.
2006: Nokia releases Lifeblog 2.0, which allows people to upload audio notes, photographs, location information, and other records of life events to a database.
00:25 Posted in Research tools | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: future interfaces
The comments are closed.