You Must Remember This

With great interest, I have been observing the developments in continuous lifelong capture, which has been gaining momentum over the last few years. By lifelong capture, I refer to someone digitally logging every moment and element of their lives, a usually permanent recording of an activity by a participant in the activity. This process often results in the unanticipated capture of valuable moments. So why is this happening now, 60 years after Vannevar Bush’s famous article “As We May Think”?1 First, we’ve achieved adequate compression techniques, network bandwidth, and storage, resulting in a more prolific role of digital audio, video, and real-time data streams in our everyday life. Second, through the miniaturization of cameras and screens, the commercialization and mass production of recording tools let us passively capture events without having to operate recording equipment or even consciously record. At last year’s ACM Multimedia conference, the two best-known protagonists of this research direction, Gordon Bell, of Microsoft Bay Area Research Center, and Steve Mann, of the University of Toronto, gave compelling presentations on the state of the art.2 Although both represent different focal points within the lifelong capture universe, they clearly described the advances already achieved with respect to capture, retrieval, organization, and search. They also addressed, to some extent, the challenges we face within these issues. The presentations were so stimulating that a lot of additional thoughts and associations crossed my mind, which left me feeling, surprisingly, uneasy.