These will be all the rage at future demonstrations

[andrewducker]

Twenty years ago, David Brin wrote about the death of privacy in "Earth" (later, he wrote a non-fiction book covering this in more detail, The Transparent Society. The lynchpin piece of tech behind this was the ability to record everything that people saw during the day, and then post it online. Which was pretty forward thinking for 1990.

Today, jwz posted a link to this:

It has a five hour memory. It records all of the time, but only starts saving when you hit record - at which point it starts at the beginning of its 30-second buffer. In other words, you see something suspicious, hit the button, and get the thing that you saw recorded for later perusal.

If I was going to be somewhere the police were going to be, well, policing, then considering the death of Ian Tomlinson, and the intermittent bad behaviour which occurs, I'd be wearing one of these things. Heck, faced with a group of people all wearing recording devices, would you want to cause trouble?

Next up - software to take the output from a few hundred of these, map them together, and produce a 3D playback that you can then pan a virtual camera through...

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Dear gods, that's an awesome design. Currently, it has 4GB memory, & within a couple of years, 128 GB flash memory will be fairly cheap. At that point, you've got the capability to record continuously for 5 days (or given that no one is likely to record more than 12-16 hours - 7-10 days), if you can get the battery life up so that it only requires daily recharging. In any case, I'm betting we're only 3-5 years from life-logging being a significant fringe hobby practiced by at least several hundred thousand people or maybe even several million people. The future is indeed now.