By Dave Farber, farber@cis.upenn.edu
The sunglasses you wear in the future could help you photograph important
moments in your life.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3111004.stm
Camera specs take candid snaps
Soon your sunglasses could help you capture all the important moments of
your life.
A prototype pair of sunglasses with a camera built in to them has been created
by Hewlett Packard researchers.
"It means you now have a wearable camera which nobody will notice and can take
pictures while being involved in events," said Huw Robson from Hewlett
Packard.
But experts say there could be privacy implications if this sort of
technology becomes part of everyday life.
Frame your shots
The sunglasses developed at the Hewlett Packard labs in Bristol in the west of
England sport a camera that constantly takes images of what a wearer sees. The
camera also has an off-switch to preserve privacy.
This is part of the story of electronics becoming smaller and embedded in
everything and cheap enough so that people can afford it Huw Robson, HP
Digital Media Lab "If you are capturing your life as you walk around and you
can simply and easily filter through that when you get home and get the
important shots, that is going to be of great value to people," said Mr
Robson, manager of
the Bristol Digital Media Lab.
"Clearly that means that you get a lot of images and part of the problem that
we are solving is how do you sort through those images to find the good images
among all the junk," he told the BBC programme Go Digital.
To tackle image overload, the HP system captures information about images,
called metadata, too.
This extra data keeps track of how and where a picture was taken and can spot
if a subject was walking or turning.
The system also inspects images to see if people are smiling or looking
directly at the camera lens.
"That sort of information can help us with the image processing," said Mr
Robson, "to look at pictures and qualify them."
"This lets us judge whether they are good pictures in terms of composition and
how well are they framed, but also in terms of the timing," he said, "is it
the right sequence of images?"
The images can be processed in a handheld computer attached to the sunglasses
or on a conventional home computer.
Disturbing trend
The camera glasses have already been tested in the real world. One triallist
used them to take images of their children playing catch, while another wore a
pair while playing football.
"This is part of the story of electronics becoming smaller and embedded in
everything and cheap enough so that people can afford it," said Mr Robson.
But some are concerned about the notion of people being able to secretly take
candid snapshots of the world around them.
"It's a cool piece of technology but frankly the idea of people wandering
around wearing sunglasses photographing me all the time is really disturbing,"
said technology analyst Bill Thompson.
"HP need to look at the implications on privacy and stuff like that before
they flood the market with these."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3111004.stm
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