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A presentation that I gave at the October 2013 Quantified Self meetup in Portland, Oregon. I began wearing an automated camera around my neck in August of 2012. This presentation is the why and how of my lifelogging experiment, including how you can use it to make your life searchable.
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Search Your Life
Setup
• Android phone• Tasker for Android– Phone automation
• Rooted– To turn off shutter noise
How Long Has This Been Going On?
• Pretty continuous since August 4th, 2012• A few times farther back
Quantified Self – 7/19/2011
Why?
• Initially: – Seemed interesting• Seeing what’s possible
– A historical record• For me• For my descendents• For “other people”
Why?
• Initially: – Fodder for future technology• “Agents” that understand behavior
– Photos are just another stream of data• Life searching (Tivo + Google)
– One of several streams of possible data– “Who did I talk about QS with last week?”
Facial Recognition
• Picasa does it– My broad estimates:• 30% of possible faces found• 10% of found faces accurately recognized
– Mostly doesn’t find a match
• Creates Views by Person
Tagging
• Tagging activities– New thing for me– Walking– Driving
• Tagging locations– Home– Work– Restaurant
…Photos?• 1,440 possible minutes a day• But– Overnight blackout periods– Computer connected blackout periods– Phone crashes
• Ok, just resets the phone, which starts capturing again– Camera app crashes
• Bad, as nothing reports being wrong– Mystery outages– About 5 seconds of time slippage per photo
• 100 – 800+ a day
…Storage?
• From about 120MB to 700MB a day
• Assuming 500MB a day…• …About 183GB a year• Or about 2TB a decade• Which may sound like a lot• But you can get 2TB for
about $100 today
…Storage?
• Projected to 2020: – $1 per TB– (We’re already at half
2010 prices at $50/TB)
…Battery?
• Yes.• Yes it does.• About 3 full charges a day– Always have a backup battery ;)– Or be tethered to power when possible
…Nerve?• Feels like getting into someone’s business• Most people suspect• A few ask• Most people that ask are cautious and wonder why
– Sometimes they ask if the photos are made public• Those that have come into contact with it regularly seem to
acclimate fairly quickly• Somehow, this is not the same as a regular camera
– Surreptitious?• I’m ready to lie about it
– I haven’t had to yet
Similar Concepts
• Microsoft SenseCam– Gordon Bell• http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/pr
ojects/sensecam/– Vicon Revue• http://viconrevue.com
Similar Concepts
• OMG Life’s Autographer– http://autographer.com
Similar Concepts
• Google’s Project Glass– https://plus.google.com/+projectglass/
Similar Concepts
• Memoto on Kickstarter– Takes photo every 30 seconds– Launched on October 23, 2012– Reached their goal of $50,000 in under 5 hours– Stretch goal of $150,000 reached the same day– As of about noon today, reached $358,849 with 30
days to go– http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/martinkallstr
om/memoto-lifelogging-camera
What It’s Turned Out To Be Useful For
• “Time” Questions– When did I last have sushi?
What It’s Turned Out To Be Useful For
• “Time” Questions– When did I last have sushi?– How much time will it take me to walk home?
8:01:33 8:46:00
~45 minutes
What It’s Turned Out To Be Useful For
• “Time” Questions– When did I last have sushi?– How much time will it take me to walk home?
• “What” Questions– What was the last name of the person at the QS
data session?
What It’s Turned Out To Be Useful For
• Post-Processing Life– Tagging events later– Putting names to faces
• Setting Baselines– Retroactively
• Drum practice• Trips to the restroom• Hours in front of the TV• Coarse-grained food
tracking
What Have I Learned?
• Round is not the best surface– Lots of photos of light fixtures
• One minute is actually a lot of time– Much gets missed
What I’ve Learned
• People don’t show up as often as you’d expect– It turns out that facing your body right at someone
when you’re talking to them is not common• Need to track with your head for best results
– Reminds me of garfield MINUS garfield
What’s Missing?• Even simple things can be technically tricky
– Getting the photo taking right wasn’t simple• Complicated rules (like “not when there’s not enough light”) didn’t
work out well– Getting photos off the phone isn’t yet completely automated– No geotagging– No automatic light adjustment
• Lots of over exposed and under exposed– No shutter speed adjustment (lots of blurry)– Phone/app crashes– But phone memory isn’t really a problem
What’s Missing?
• Wider angle lens• Some way to lay this all out– By location– By time of day
• Allow for human pattern recognition to create “ah-ha”s
• Integration with other relevant data streams – TagTime data– GPS/Checkins
• Could eliminate location tagging, and add GPS searching
What’s Missing?
• Some kind of object detection (e.g. “table”)– Currently everything goes through Google Goggles– Doesn’t find much, but does occasionally find
interesting things
What’s Missing?
• Could add additional context (and, therefore, search terms)
• But there’s no way to integrate the data from Goggles back into the photos
Experiments
• Tagging TV• Tracking restaurants by employees• Adding detail to people• Food tracking
THANKS!
If you want to be part of my ongoing record, come stand in front of me for at least a minute (and talking would be cool too ;)
Storing in the Cloud
• Google+ will auto-upload all your photos to a private location– They are down-sized– They are hard to search– Can be battery intensive– I didn’t find a limit
• Dropbox is similar, though they have stated limits
Is it Noticeable/Distracting?
• Takes a while to get used to• Having the camera faded away over 30 days
Possibilities
• People clusters– Which people are associated with which other
people (on some sort of relationship graph)
