Today, as never before, you can capture your life and share it with your friends and family. Camera phones, media players with built-in microphones, portable storage and blogging software enable you to record whatever happens, while cheap hard drives mean you can keep it forever. All this adds up to what the Trendwatching.com website reckons is an emerging megatrend called "life caching".
"Why do we think this trend is ready to take off? Well, the necessary enablers are now all in place: required hardware and software are ubiquitous, there's ample availability of affordable storage space, blogging mentality is hitting the masses, and some of the major 'new economy' brands are getting in on the game, promising mass life-caching products at mass prices," says the site.
Life caching is already explicit in Show Your World, the US advertising for Samsung camera phones, cited by Trendwatching. The campaign says that capturing images and turning them into mini-movies is "the most vibrant way to capture and share life experiences with family and friends".
Of course, life caching is not a new idea, as Egypt's pyramids show. Generations of people have kept diaries, scrapbooks and photo albums. US scientist Vannevar Bush envisaged keeping everything in a Memex machine, in a famous essay published in the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly. And in 1992, usability guru Don Norman wrote about everyone having a personal Teddy: you would get it when you were two or three years old, and it would store all the experiences you ever had.
But four things have brought these futuristic visions much closer to reality. First, new devices such as camera phones and digital recorders have made it much easier to record your life. Second, the use of digital media has allowed all the different types of record to be combined instead of stored separately. Third, the cost of disk storage has fallen to the point where many PC users can afford the terabyte or two of storage needed to keep everything. Finally, the internet has made it easy to share the results.
Digitisation is a huge advance. Many families have photos on anything from 35mm slides to old glass plates. If they have movies, they could be on 8mm film or VHS. If they have music or conversations, they are probably on different formats of cassette tape. All of these are incompatible, and don't connect very well to paper records such as diaries. But they can all be digitised and stored using the same software on the same hard drive, then linked together.
A Tablet PC running OneNote software and Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC edition is one way to do this. You can take handwritten notes on screen, using a stylus, and have them synchronised with a recording taken using the built-in microphone. Photos can be uploaded from a digital camera and pasted in later. A Tablet PC is far too cumbersome for capturing life on the move, but the same sort of facilities could soon reach personal organisers and smart phones.
For speed and convenience, the camera phone has already become the main driver for the life caching megatrend. At the moment, the pictures are not very good quality, but they are getting better, and it is usually fairly easy to upload the images to a blog (hence "moblogging") or email them to friends.
Nokia's Christian Lindholm has captured this trend perfectly with Lifeblog software, first discussed in Online on March 11. Load the Lifeblog software on to a PC, connect up a Nokia 7610 phone, and Lifeblog transfers the pictures and puts them into a timeline with tags to record when and where they were taken.
Lindholm says: "When this was a research project at Nokia six years ago, it was called 'memory prosthesis', and ironically, that's how I'm using it. I take a picture when I meet someone, and write a little note about them. So I'm using my Lifeblog as a sort of personal information manager where I'm not starting from a person's name or phone number. I'm optimistic that later I'll be able to remember something so I can search for them!"
The fact that Lifeblog becomes a receptacle for personal and family information is the reason it isn't, despite the name, blogging software. "Obviously, the name is mandating us to move in that direction," says Lindholm, "and we've done a sepa rate trial to validate mobile blogging using the Atom protocol: that's what I've been using to blog to my own site. The aim is to integrate the 'blog out of Lifeblog' functionality in the foreseeable future. But at the moment, my view is that the online archive is a subset of your total life."
Your personal diary and photo album almost certainly contain things you wouldn't want to put on the web for everyone to see.
Lindholm also reckons that Google's purchase of Picasa and its photo album software validates Nokia's strategy, "which is that you need to have a PC-based front end for storage and an online presence for sharing. But I think our concept is just better than [grid-based] Picasa because it is column-based," he says. "Lifeblog has a classic newspaper or book layout, so it is very easy to read."
Microsoft Research has also been working on life caching software for many years with a project called MyLifeBits, headed by one of the world's leading computer scientists, Gordon Bell. This project involves digitising and searching everything you have ever said, read, seen or heard. Darpa, America's defence research agency, also has a Lifelog project, and the UK's Computing Research Committee has proposed Memories for Life as one of its "grand challenges for computing science".
But one of the drawbacks with life caching is that it requires effort. Lyndsay Williams, at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, has a different approach, which is to make the recording automatic. She's developing what she calls "a black box data recorder for the human body".
Williams' latest prototype is the SenseCam 4, which can be worn as a pendant or badge, and could be made even smaller if it was converted into a product. Wear a SenseCam and it automatically takes photographs of things that happen in your life. "If you just walk into a different room, it senses the transi tion and takes a photograph," says Williams. "It's triggered by things like acceleration and light-level changes. If someone stands in front of you, it will sense the heat from them and capture an image." She is also trying other inputs, such as a heart-rate sensor and GPS satellite location, and using low-power wireless to send sense data straight to her PC. "There's a lot more you can do, but I wanted to build something real, that you could wear and get experimental data from."
Of course, not all the devices have to fit in a pendant, and Williams is one of the researchers credited with the recent Microsoft patent on using the human body as a data and power network.
The SenseCam can take around 2,000 wide-angle pictures a day, and these are best viewed as mini-movies - compressed and played back fast. You can download a short example from a BBC News report to see how well it works as a reminder. "You can have a rewind of your entire day in about three minutes," says Williams.
"The main idea that people like is for tourism applications, because it's passive capture: you can enjoy yourself and record all the interesting things you see, even when you can't be bothered to take a picture," she says. "We're trying it this week at the Edinburgh Festival. It works for sport, as well."
The idea also has more serious uses. "We demonstrated the SenseCam to people at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge, and they said it would be particularly useful for the partner of somebody who had very bad memory problems," says Williams. "It would also be useful for people who have to take their medicine at certain times and forget to do so: the SenseCam would provide a record."
All this raises privacy issues already familiar from the use of camera phones and CCTV surveillance cameras. With only 14 examples of the prototype to worry about, the SenseCam has not aroused concern, but people don't seem to object to it. "All the people who have spoken to me about it see the huge benefits," says Williams. "For example, if you have a car accident or come off your bike, you've got a record, and it could mean you get more timely medical treatment."
In any case, this is the way the world is going. "The SenseCam is part of a larger program in ubiquitous computing at the lab in Cambridge," says Ken Wood, from Microsoft's new Interactive Systems research group. "We're building up general expertise in this area, with input from psychologists and sociologists as well as computer scientists, so that we build things that enhance everyday life. We're thinking of wearable and embedded computational agents in everyday items. The father of ubiquitous computing is Mark Weiser, and his idea was that computers gradually become invisible. You don't have to interact with them, you interact with what they are doing."
"Ultimately, life caching is not just your life, it's what's happening in your home," says Paul Jackson, a senior analyst with Forrester research in Amsterdam. "Your pet-cams and temperature monitors and all the sensors connected to your body can all add to this."
You may never lose your car keys again.
Trendwatching
www.trendwatching.com/trends/LIFE_CACHING.htm
Nokia Lifeblog
www.nokia.com/lifeblog
The Teddy
http://www.jnd.org/TurnSignals/TS-TheTeddy.html
