Narrative Clip - life logging camera

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today I received an item which I've been eagerly awaiting. I've been looking forward to this since I backed it, I think, beginning of last year sometime. That's the kind of Narrative Camera or Memoto Camera. It's a lifelogging camera that takes a picture every 30 seconds. This is it here, and it's a really interesting idea, if not slightly controversial. I'm a huge fan of

[00:00:25] Speaker A: lifelogging, kind of capturing as much data as you can about things about everything, to be honest. And so when I first came across the Fitbits, I jumped on that with the original design, which I kept losing, and then this one, which is a little bit more permanent, strapped to my wrist. And so this was a brilliant addition to that. I played around with various other ideas for capturing more data about myself and about my life,

[00:00:50] Speaker A: and this is a— this will hopefully form an interesting part of it. What that information will be used for, who knows? But I received this probably 5 or 6 hours ago, picked it up, and I've had a chance to have a quick play around with it. The packaging for the camera is really nice. It comes in a little solid cardboard box with a magnetic catch on the side, and so that initial experience of getting a product like this is

[00:01:16] Speaker A: great. Then when you open it up, you've got the camera and the cable kind of set in this pre-shaped foam. Along with a little kind of instruction booklet on the side. To get everything set up, you head over to the web address there, and the instructions then contain brief information about the lights, how to kind of tap to take a picture, and how you might use it. The camera itself seemed to come slightly

[00:01:42] Speaker A: charged, but not so much. It kind of jumped through the first 30-40% of its charge sequence really quickly, but then took quite a while to get all the way up from there. The camera then kind of connects up with this connection here. It's a standard kind of micro USB, which is really nice, and that is used for charging and data transfer. There are some issues with

[00:02:07] Speaker A: this device. It's not as good as it could have been, but I think when you're building something like this, you've got to draw the line somewhere on features and just what it can support and what it can do. And so it takes a picture every kind of 30 seconds, and you can force a picture by tapping the camera, and it will then take a picture. I'm not sure what the delay is from the tap to the capture yet, but that's

[00:02:32] Speaker A: the 2 kind of methods. The device supposedly has a GPS inside. It's supposed to have a GPS inside, at least, to geotag the images, but so far the images that have come back haven't had any kind of tagging data on them. I've used this a bit indoors and also the walk back from work, and in both those cases nothing was captured with regards to GPS. The images are fairly good in low light, at

[00:02:57] Speaker A: least first kind of look in that regards. There are— it seems pretty good. The other kind of big issue I've got with this is the way you get the data off. The It doesn't have any kind of wireless connectivity, there's no Bluetooth, no WiFi inside, and so all the pictures come out via the USB cable. It's not so bad, but the problem is, at least the

[00:03:23] Speaker A: announcement during the Kickstarter phase was it would have a 2-day battery life and 2 days data storage, and so you're going to need to plug it in to charge and download every day or 2. Which means you can't take it on holiday. You might be able to have a phone charger with you to charge it up, but the battery's going to fill up, the memory's going to fill up, and at which point it'll be useless. So if you want to use something

[00:03:48] Speaker A: like this on holiday, you've got to take a computer with you, which certainly isn't ideal. It's possible that's been changed. I imagine it will be dependent on the memory, so rather than a hard cap at 2 days, it'll be when the memory fills up. So if you kind of turn it off or keep it deactivated a lot of the time, you'll probably get a lot more kind of storage in there, but time will tell how kind of severe that

[00:04:13] Speaker A: is. The other thing I wasn't expecting was just the sheer size of the images and the volume of the images. The kind of short runs, I kind of had this clipped on, run for maybe half an hour or so, I took it off and connected it up and it had I think about 50, 60-odd meg of images to download in that time. I was at work and that uploaded to the internet really quickly, but since getting home

[00:04:38] Speaker A: I've been able to appreciate how slow and how annoying this is going to be each day. It'll be almost certainly into a gigabyte or more of imagery every day to upload, which is going to be problematic. So I'm going to make sure I kind of connect this and upload data when I'm at work. where they've got kind of nice fiber connections rather than at home. The other annoying thing I've noticed so far is the way it hangs. At least I haven't tried it on a variety of

[00:05:03] Speaker A: clothing yet, just this t-shirt, and when I'm sitting down it hangs pointing downwards, and when I'm standing up it points upwards, so it's never in a position to capture going forward what I'm looking at. So if I'm sitting at a desk, it's just pointing downwards and around, which is not so bad, but On the walk home, for example, it was just capturing above my kind of eyeline. It was really annoying. And

[00:05:29] Speaker A: so I need to explore a kind of a good way of wearing this, or kind of a better way of wearing this, so that it captures more of what's around me. I also need to spend— go outside into the open a little bit more and try and get the GPS up and running properly. To make sense of all the pictures this camera captures, it looks for similarities and groups them into moments. At the moment, these are only accessible via the application. And so the—

[00:05:55] Speaker A: it kind of tries to— I believe it tries to match based on the kind of lighting conditions, what's in the image, and group them into distinct moments. And so I don't have much data to go on here. I'm just looking at a couple of hours worth of information in a very limited range of settings, but it appears to be when you connect this up and upload some pictures, it won't combine the same moments

[00:06:21] Speaker A: from an upload before, from 2 separate uploads. For example, I've been sitting at the desk in 2 of these uploads on here, so I've got 3 kind of uploads, and the first 2 are basically the same, and yet they're still listed as 2 moments. So when you upload some new pictures, it won't then go back and modify, which, depending on how you use the camera, probably isn't a big deal. If you're then going to upload at the end of the day or beginning of the day, then

[00:06:46] Speaker A: it'll kind of match correctly, so I don't think that's too much of a problem. The other thing is I'm still unclear as to how it's going to split into moments. So I've got— I've had 3 uploads of the data onto my phone here, and I've got 3 moments. It's never split anything into more than one. I was in— I moved between a couple of environments in some of these, admittedly not for long periods of time, so that's still

[00:07:11] Speaker A: something I'm interested to kind of see. How that kind of works, how the kind of real analysis works. The other potential option for kind of working with these images— the uploader on the computer has an option to save the pictures locally. So normally it downloads and uploads and then deletes, but you can check a box and have it save locally. And so it could be possible to save these images and then have an automated

[00:07:37] Speaker A: process which kind of backs them up, transfers them to Kind of shifts them up to Amazon S3 or something like that, and then potentially you can do other things with them. So you could have your own kind of analysis running or own kind of grouping running. Certainly if there's— if the images do get correctly geotagged and that data is there, then that information could be really interesting for grouping

[00:08:02] Speaker A: your own and doing your own kind of breakdowns, kind of plotting this onto a map. And even then, that GPS data is something I'm really interested in getting. I'm slightly concerned there was none and moving along, but a couple of years back I built an application to aggregate all of my location data from every source I could think of— Gowalia,

[00:08:30] Speaker A: Twitter notifications, Facebook check-ins, Foursquare check-ins, all these things. It would scan all these services and aggregate them into a single database of all my locations versus time. And that was kind of really interesting. You can then plot that and see what kind of movements and analyze the data. And if this does work properly, then that could be a really accurate single consistent source of location data. So I will kind

[00:08:55] Speaker A: of try and take a look at that, capture some of the images that are being kind of downloaded from the camera, and hopefully when the GPS starts working, if it does start working, and see what information's on there. With any luck, they will have some really interesting geotagging data on them. The other side of this camera, the other potential problem, is something I've yet to experience yet. I'm just getting it, but I've already had hints of it, and that's the privacy concerns surrounding it. This

[00:09:21] Speaker A: idea is, I think, really going to freak people out. The already kind of Google Glass, which is on some levels a lot less severe than this, given that you actually have to physically record video or take a picture, Whereas this does it all the time, and there's a huge amount of outcry and complaints from people around that. And yet this is potentially even worse. Thankfully, very few people know about these devices or this device, so most people

[00:09:46] Speaker A: aren't going to recognize it. But from people I spoke to, there's already been some kind of fear and concern about it. The— it's— I think that what I've thought about it so far is if anyone asks, I'll kind of might try and dismiss the question as to what it is, or just some kind of personal tracking device or pedometer-style device like this. But for one, my girlfriend's kind of claimed that she won't be

[00:10:11] Speaker A: in the same room as me when I'm wearing this camera, and it remains to be seen if that's going to be the case or not. But these privacy concerns are something we're going to have to deal with. In addition to that, you're also taking pictures all the time, and so there's a lot of environments where you're going to be that That's not going to be allowed. And so if you're in a cinema or a theater or gallery, somewhere like that where

[00:10:36] Speaker A: photography is forbidden, you're, you're still going to be taking these pictures. And they're the kind of staff in there probably aren't going to be aware of these types of devices. And so there's, I think it's a little bit of information tucked away in the help for the application for people to read, but it's, it's quite a serious, potentially serious issue that hasn't really been looked at yet. As far as I'm aware, there's only 2 of these devices or types of device on the market, so it's

[00:11:02] Speaker A: possible these kind of problems haven't really been discussed or kind of brought out into the media yet. And to be honest, I hope they don't. For those people who are kind of aware and understand, these are personal devices. These pictures are just for myself. It's for my kind of own interest and own reasons. So No one needs to be worried that they're being taken because it's nothing more than I

[00:11:27] Speaker A: would have seen anyway. And whilst it's an obvious kind of point to make, and it's, I think, the correct point, people are still going to be a little bit wary. To be honest, as far as I'm aware, the original research that went into these types of devices was done by Microsoft years ago for Alzheimer's research, for people kind of going out and having a visual memory of their day. And I think that was a fantastic motive. Obviously it's

[00:11:52] Speaker A: changed slightly, but I think the underlying reason of having a kind of a picture log or a proper kind of record of your day, something you can look back on, is brilliant. I mean, so often you kind of go off on holiday or on a trip and you'll take pictures of various different things, but you won't be capturing everything. You miss so many memories, and a couple of years down the line you'll take a— you might kind of remember back and You've forgotten

[00:12:17] Speaker A: so many of the details, whereas if you've got something like this, you can then start flicking through and really relive that experience. I'm really looking forward to using this camera. I think it's fantastic. So I've just been taking a look at the specifications for the camera, just to try and get to the bottom of how many images it's going to store on it and for how long it will store that. And the 2-day limit, I can see where that's come from now.

[00:12:43] Speaker A: It's storing, kind of taking 5-megapixel images, and it's got an 8 GB onboard memory. And if you break that out every 30 seconds across 48 hours, that's 8 GB worth of images roughly. And that's assuming you're taking constantly. So if you knock off 8 hours of that for sleep, things like that, I think you could easily spread to 3 days

[00:13:09] Speaker A: with only It's still not a week, so it's still, it's still a real pain for going on holiday or anything like that, but it's a little better, I guess. And the other sensor in here, which I didn't realize, there's a compass kind of sensor, so it knows which direction it's facing, kind of north, south, east, west kind of thing. And hopefully

[00:13:34] Speaker A: that data will also be attached onto the images. So I've rambled on a little bit about this thing now, but I am really pleased with it, at least so far. I'm really looking forward to getting to use it and to start kind of capturing this data. Hopefully the GPS problem will get solved, or if it— GPS problem— there isn't a problem there, and when I get out into the open it will get a proper lock. It's probably never had a decent

[00:13:59] Speaker A: GPS lock before, so it'll be a kind a cold start, and I was walking next to buildings, which might explain that. Then like that, we'll get the app up and running, and it'll turn out to be a really brilliant device.