Gordon Bell of Microsoft’s Media Presence Research Group, and founder of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, is making his life completely paperless and backing up his memory so he has the potential to remember every event that takes place around him.
So he doesn’t miss out on important daily events, Bell wears a SenseCam, developed by Microsoft Research, that takes pictures whenever it detects he may want a photograph. The camera’s infrared sensor picks up on nearby body heat and takes a snapshot of anyone else in the room. It also takes pictures as the lighting changes, to capture different settings.
Bell says his aim is to create “a surrogate memory,” one that is supplemental to, but ultimately as good as your own, potentially allowing you to listen to every conversation you ever had when you were twenty-one and find that elusive photograph of the obscure date you had on summer vacation in Mexico.
His team has also been designing the software that will enable other users to build a personal autobiographical archive. The MyLifeBits (MLB) software, developed by Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder, includes a complete package that can record the whole gamut of digital information from websites to instant messages, even television and radio transcripts. Bell wants to record absolutely everything available. Though ther are no current plans to develop this specific product commercially, Bell says;
" … it is simply how computers have to evolve over 5 decades to encode every form of information going from numbers to letters to computer generated 2d & 3d objects, to pictures and music to moving pictures. The best way to look at the project is that over time, features will continually be inserted into all PCs e.g. databases, that carry out the functions we currently have."
If this technology is developed further, the future of storing personal information will be much greener.