HP’S ‘Casual Capture’ Project: your life as photo montage
Hewlett-Packard’s Bristol, England lab is developing a new consumer photography system that could “casually” snap a steady stream of images as a person goes about her daily life and store them in data centers, where they could be retrieved for printing. Ideally, the user would don a wearable camera mounted inside the bridge of a pair of glasses or somewhere else unobtrusive, and then forget about it. The camera would continuously record approximately what is in the wearer’s field of vision, and when something notable happens, the wearer would make an indication of some kind, either by speaking or by pressing a button. The camera would then take over, zooming in to select what appear to be the best shots and automatically adjusting and cropping them. “You say, ‘Something has happened, I’d like to remember that,’” says Phil Cheatle of HP Labs’ digital media department. “It allows you to take part in the event instead of hiding behind the technology. The challenge is selecting what’s interesting automatically.”
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