Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [22]
One of my favorite examples of how the SenseCam enhances life comes from Cathal Gurrin, a lecturer at Dublin City University in Ireland. Cathal set out to perform a year-long experiment, wearing the SenseCam during all his waking hours. When the year was over, many people expected him to be glad to stop. In fact, he wouldn’t give the SenseCam back. Cathal began wearing the SenseCam daily in June 2006 and, as I write, has worn the SenseCam for almost three years, acquiring over three million photos. Gurrin has a collection of his favorite photos rotating on a digital photo album on his desk which he shows off with the enthusiasm of a new parent with baby pictures. “Look,” he says, “here’s a picture of the first moment I met my girlfriend—not that I knew she’d become my girlfriend at the time.”
A fun thing to do is to play back all the SenseCam images from a day or a week in rapid succession, which takes just a few minutes. Talk about your life flashing before your eyes! It’s an amazing feeling to see your life on fast-forward like that.
I enjoyed taking the SenseCam on walkabouts with my GPS. I could later reconstruct my travels on an animated map, with pictures taken along the way to tell the story. The best series I did was an eight-hour trip along the Great Ocean Road in Australia and through a treetop walk in a rain forest.
My SenseCam has captured many special moments, especially at parties, lunches, and conference exhibits. I have a sequence of when I was admitted to the hospital for heart bypass surgery in July 2007. My partner, Sheridan, wore the camera as I was wheeled into the operating room.
THE DAY OF CARPE
By 2004, we were so excited about where MyLifeBits was taking us, and saw so much potential, that we wanted to encourage others to get involved. Jim Gemmell launched a workshop at ACM Multimedia 2004, a professional conference for computer scientists. The theme of the workshop, which was held annually for three years, was CARPE: Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences.
In 2005 we invited universities to submit proposals for research projects. We received eighty submissions and selected fourteen of them to receive money, SenseCams, and our software. I was thrilled at the wonderful results from academia, touching into many areas and ideas we would never have thought of, from helping disabled students to logging therapy sessions for stroke victims.
As of this writing I have 261 gigabytes of information saved on my main computer and about 100 gigabytes accessible in my cloud. I add about one gigabyte a month. This doesn’t include continuous audio and video, but that’s on the horizon.
The MyLifeBits software is far from perfect. The hardware right now is clunky enough that I don’t use it all the time (I hate dealing with heaps of batteries and chargers!). But between MyLifeBits and the work of our colleagues in the research community, we believe we have a proof of concept. We’ve built and experienced enough to confidently endorse Total Recall.
We will be taking a tour of how Total Recall has affected my life so far and how it will affect your life, in ways direct and indirect, large and small, as e-memory becomes standard furniture in our daily lives. Before we get to the effects Total Recall can have on work, health, learning, and our personal relationships, we need to take a deeper look at what science can tell us about the meeting of e-memory and bio-memory, that stuff that resides in our heads.
CHAPTER 3
THE MEETING OF E-MEMORY AND BIO-MEMORY
I was invited to a birthday party for computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland. Would I be willing to say a few words?
Great, I thought. I can get up and tell them I run into Ivan about every five years, and we enjoy our conversations.
Honestly, that was all that came to me. Then I entered Ivan’s name into the search window in MyLifeBits, and to my surprise and relief, I immediately recalled emotionally evocative and intellectually intriguing details I had completely