A quick round up of various SenseCam videos found on YouTube and also a good overview of what a SenseCam is and what it can do. Just in case you are wondering why I am so interested in the Microsoft SenseCam, it is because I developed my own over two years ago and have been wearing it ever since, recording as much of my daily life as I possibly can.

If you are aware of any other interesting videos that I might have missed, please send them to me and I will post them here.

Quick BBC Intro To SenseCam

Quick Summary Of What SenseCam Is

Steven Hodges Talking About Memory

SenseCam for Alzheimer’s Sufferers

One the technology applications that SenseCam could be applied to. Personally, I think SenseCam and the software applications to sift and sort all the data collected will be truly amazing once it becomes ubiquitous and everyone has one and needs one. I cannot imagine living without my SenseCam now that I have one.

Building A SenseCam Whilst Wearing A SenseCam

Oh boy, I love women who know how to handle a soldering iron and can write code in a real programming language.

Tate Gallery Visit

A visit to the Tate as recorded by the SenseCam. I have similar visual records of my visits to the Terracotta Warrior exhibits and other museums.

Stop Motion Aikido

Not sure if this was taken with a SenseCam or not, it shows up under “SenseCam” when I search YouTube.

Going About Your Daily Life

Video Diary

A diary of someone’s day taken from the viewpoint of the SenseCam. What is notable about this is that the wearer occasionally removes the SenseCam to photograph themselves.

As you can see from the viewpoint in the video, there are still issues with the location of a SenseCam missing some areas that are being cropped by the wearer’s placement of the lens.

There are also lots of shots of the car’s steering wheel, and this is a common complaint against my own personal SenseCam. Situating it too low misses the view that I can see, it is almost like I need a separate camera lens mounted just behind my ear that will capture what I see, rather than just a portion of it.

SenseCam Around Cambridge

Lyndsay Williams’ journey around Cambridge, set to some funky techno. Not sure if the music in the video was originally chosen for it or whether some YouTube hack added it later, but it is an interesting project.

PowerPoint About SenseCam Architecture

This is a classic “bad PowerPoint” slideshow, but it is interesting for the fact that it shows some of the architecture of the SenseCam and some of the uses.

Over the past two years I have become so dependent on my SenseCam for capturing images of my life and journaling my daily existence that I cannot now imagine living without it. To paraphrase a certain famous actor, “You can have my SenseCam from me when you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

Many of the images you see in my blog posts were taken with my own SenseCam, and I have so many great shots to share I do not think I will ever run out of images to choose from before I run out of things to say.

Again, if you know of any other SenseCam videos I am missing, send me a link and I will update this post with them.

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This video is a bit old but I just found it so it is new to me: James May of the BBC show about “Big Ideas” where he takes a quick gander at Microsoft’s SenseCam. James wore the SenseCam he was loaned for just a weekend and immediately hit the issue that everyone who wears a SenseCam already has, the sheer amount of data captured by the device.

How do you make sense (a pun) of it all? It is interesting to see that the software that the Microsoft researchers have come up with is no more sophisticated than the Python software I have managed to develop to do the same kinds of manipulations, i.e. locate significant events and in a semi-autonomous way tag them.

Over the past week or so I have been experimenting with SURF and SIFT using OpenCV and Python to automatically determine places I have been to before. I can do this with a GPS but it would be nice to have an automated process, which is about 70% feature complete right now, that can recognise rooms I have been in at the office, or at home, or other locations that I frequent, and automatically group them together.

I am also working on using OpenCV to automatically recognise human faces and group images together, automatically tagging those people that I know and indicating people that are not tagged.

I am still making use of Windows Live Photo Gallery, simply because it offers some very fast image browsing and tagging functionality, along with PhotoSynth, but I have begun to use it less and less as my own application develops new features. With SURF analysis I have an almost complete PhotoSynth clone that can create a 3D scene from all of my SenseCam images.

I am wondering how Alan, the researcher working on software, is able to automatically determine significant events in a day. Currently I am wrestling with this problem by looking for a gathering of human faces, significant light changes in the environment or spending time within a small geographic region determined by geo-location that is outside of my normal pattern or existence. But I have yet to fathom how the Microsoft software does it.

It is good to see the popular press taking an interest in these devices, but I still fear that they are focusing on the wrong thing, turning their attention to the “man jewellery” rather than what happens after the images have been captured.

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