Category Archives: Lifelogging

Effects of Camera Position and Media Type on Lifelogging Images (MUM Best Paper Award)

At this year’s International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) we presented results from a RECALL study on lifelog camera  positioning. MUM is a leading annual international conference, which provides a forum for presenting the latest research results on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. The paper – spearheaded by Katrin Wolf – has been awarded with the best paper award.
Continue reading Effects of Camera Position and Media Type on Lifelogging Images (MUM Best Paper Award)

Dagstuhl Seminar on Augmenting Human Memory – Capture and Recall in the Era of Lifelogging

Schloß Dagstuhl
Castle Dagstuhl

Dagstuhl, a remote place in the greens of Germany, is a well known destination in the Informatics community. The infamous Dagstuhl seminars provide a platform for researchers for personal interaction and open discussions of results, ideas, sketches and pending challenges. In the week between August, 31st and September, 5th, of this year 28 researchers from various disciplines came together to discuss the topic of “Augmenting the Human Memory — Capture in the Era of Lifelogging”.The seminar organized by Mark Billinghurst, Nigel Davies, Marc Langheinrich and Albrecht Schmidt, explored how technology can fundamentally change the way we interact with human memory. This included the focus on various trends that are currently changing our existing research on capture and playback technologies, privacy and society, as well as existing theories of memory. Continue reading Dagstuhl Seminar on Augmenting Human Memory – Capture and Recall in the Era of Lifelogging

The “RECALL House” Experiment

The small hostel in the Lake District that we took over for our "RECALL House" experiment
The small hostel in the Lake District that we took over for our “RECALL House” experiment

Last month we organized an internal 3-day event for gathering experience on how comprehensive imagery life-logging works, both from a technical point of view as well as from a participant’s point of view. From May 20-23 the Lancaster team rented a small hostel up in the Lake District, UK, for us, and lugged up plenty of food and technical equipment to keep us busy (and well fed) during the three days. The advantage of this rural setting was that we could rent the entire hostel for the team, hence minimizing the chances that other guests would be caught on one of our many cameras. Our only outside contact was a lady that brought us light luncheons each day, as well as the hostel owner who checked us in the first day. Each site brought different capturing devices, thus transforming the hostel into “RECALL House” — an instrumented environment (a very much simplified version of the MIT PlaceLab if you will) geared towards capturing imaging data from all participants during most of our waking hours. Continue reading The “RECALL House” Experiment

Lifelogging and Challenges of a Holistic Quantified Self

Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and the availability of wearable technologies, large-scale data collection is on the rise. People log their steps with commercial products such as Fitbit and keep track of their activities and locations using apps like endomondo. Gordon Bell [1] went even further and made it his mission to attempt to record his entire life: images, sounds, videos as well as personal documents. He pioneered the trend towards lifelogging applications that has been supported by research projects such as Microsoft’s SenseCam [2]. Whereas technologies such as Fitbit are aimed at collecting quantitative data about movement and health to set incentives for improvement, the SenseCam serves as memory aid by automatically capturing a digital record of the wearer’s day. Continue reading Lifelogging and Challenges of a Holistic Quantified Self