Odysseus

The aim of the project is to develop a novel collaborative media browsing tool for visual lifelogs. The tool will support browsing of multiple user’s visual lifelog collections interwoven into a single searchable interface to enable a single event, captured by multiple people, to be shared across users and represented from different yet complementary perspectives.

Lifelogging is a new and exciting area of multimedia research that can be best described as the act of recording multiple aspects of one’s life in digital format. The most common (and basic) form of lifelogging is the creation and maintenance of personal blogs, however with the growing ubiquity of different forms of media capture this only hints at what will be possible in the future. For this project, we will build upon the AIC’s research in digital multimedia lifelogging. In particular, this project will work with visual lifelog collections of photos and other associated metadata such as time, date, location, temperature, activity of user, etc. Images will be captured using a SenseCam, a prototype wearable camera developed by Microsoft Research. SenseCam, is designed to take photos passively (without user intervention) at appropriate time intervals, such as when the user has just stopped moving or when an object passes in front of the wearer. When worn continuously, a SenseCam will typically capture approximately 3,000 images a day, amounting to over one million images per year. Clearly, this represents a comprehensive visual record of a user’s day-to-day activities but it also raises practical problems in terms of how to organise and provide access to such a wealth of data. In fact, the AIC has developed a number of innovative approaches to structuring, organising and presenting this kind of life-log data – see http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/SenseCam/

While to date, our work has primarily focused on managing the lifelog of an individual, the aim of this project will be to share experiences contained within lifelogs. The initial challenge presented by this project will be to explore the means to relate events within lifelog collections to one another and to enable the matching of similar events across lifelogs. The major goal is, however, to develop a rich interactive browser to provide access and navigation to the events within a collection, and to facilitate the reliving and sharing of personal experiences and the integration of another user’s perspective of the same event into that retelling. Focus will be on visualising the multi-user events through appropriate narratives.

The project will investigate deploying these interactive browsers on a variety of access devices including standard desk-top PC, mobile devices and interactive table-top surfaces such as MERL’s Diamond Touch – see http://www.merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch/. Sample lifelogs for use in the project will be captured as part of the early phase project work. The project will involve close co-operation with the AIC lifelogging team and experienced interface design researchers. There is no specific programming requirements or development environment defined for this project, but the successful candidate will be required to work with JAVA and FLASH.

Relevance of the Project to "Technologies for Social Connectedness"

The motivation for the project is to make lifelog browsing an inherently social experience, whereas heretofore multimedia lifelogging has been an individual activity. This project will make it easy to share your multimedia lifelog with others and support group-based access to the resulting group-based collections. Providing group-based access that leverages user context (i.e. who is accessing the content and why) will potentially help uncover social connections between users.

Demonstratable Outcome

The outcome of the project will be a visually engaging collaborative multi-user interface to a search engine for a multi-user, visual lifelogs of linked events.