Laying out the foundations of Lifelogging

This is KZero entry number one about Lifelogging – and will definitely not be the last.

 

Over recent weeks I’ve noticed a surge in tweets and media articles about this concept and it’s one that’s been on our radar for a while. Time to start peeling back the layers and examining what Lifelogging is and how it will impact our lives in the future.

 

Lifelogging is essentially using technology to capture, record and store our lives, as we live them. These means the people we meet (what we see), the things we say and listen to (what we hear) and the places we visit (where we go). So far so good. Think of Lifelogging as a digital personal diary, without having to write it.

 

Pulling Lifelogging back to existing technologies and applications, in a straight-forward sense it’s simply the next evolution of ‘personal information’. First we had blogging, then micro-blogging (a la Twitter) and next up Lifelogging. The key difference here though is that ‘information’ captured by Lifelogging may not always neccessarily be published…..I’ll come back to this point in a later post.

 

So how is information captured?

This is the easy part (storage and access is for another time). It’s video cameras (for what we see), microphones (for what we say and hear) and mobile devices (for where we are). And it’s already happening. Here’s a link to a recent Business Week article on Lifelogging. And here’s the video…

 

So as a concept, Lifelogging as shown in the video, is a pretty straightforward idea. But, with most good ideas, it’s the applications and uses that are facilitated by the concept that creates the value.

But why, I hear you ask is Lifelogging being written about on the KZero blog. It’s not related to Virtual Worlds. Well, at least not at first thought. Pulling Augmented Reality into the discussion helps to position Lifelogging. AR is about using mobile devices to ‘add’ digital content into our personal experience. Inversely, Lifelogging is the inverse – it’s about using devices (a combination of mobile and recording) to ‘extract’ information – to record and store it. And that’s why Lifelogging is important in the content of the Immersive Internet.

That’s the initial overview done with. Welcome to Lifelogging. Time to move onto the juice…….