eyeBlogging

From Slashdot:

"Researchers at Human Media Lab, Queen's University in Canada presented the ECSGlasses: eye contact sensing glasses that report when people look at their wearer. When eye contact is detected, the glasses stream this information to appliances to inform these about the wearer's engagement. According to HML.Blog the ECSGlasses uses a wearable, wireless Eye-Contact Sensor (1.3MB .jpg) to gauge when the user receives eye-contact from an onlooker. eyeBlog uses this information to record and publish face-2-face conversations without dividing the user's attention between the event being recorded, and the device being used to record it. Moreover, because eyeBlog uses eye-contact to start and stop recording, users do not need to sift through hours of footage to find interesting segments. If you are the academic type you can read the paper (2.2MB .pdf), otherwise the video in .mpg (1:49min, 320x240, 7.5MB), or mp4 (1:49min, 320x240, 4.9MB) should explain everything. Video Mirror: .mp4 .mpg."

That is weird and cool, of course. I'm not sure why I'd only want to capture people's picture when they're looking at me, but it could be useful added information of course. Like, if it were combined with face recognition software, and my glasses tells me who somebody is just before they start talking to me. There are some obvious problems in the scheme, of course, like that not everybody looks at each other when they're conversing, and the norms for this change from culture to culture. But just the ability to capture the picture of everybody who looks at me could ensure that I have the most obvious source material for good pictures of them. The glasses look kind of bizarre, with a series of LEDs bouncing light off of people's faces, and back into a cyclops camera in the middle. That itself would be enough to get people to stare directly at you. In horror, maybe. But I bet there are ways of making it all smaller and less visible.

Posted by Flemming at May 17, 2004 06:18 AM | TrackBack