Odysseus

The aim of the project is to develop a gesture based interface to a personal digital lifelog using the Nintendo Wii controller.

Lifelogging is a new and exciting area of multimedia research. It can be described as the act of recording some aspect of your daily life in digital format. A basic and common form of lifelogging is the creation and maintenance of blogs. For this project, we will build upon the experience of AIC multimedia lifelogging research to develop a new and novel gesture based interface to a personal visual lifelog. These visual lifelogs are collections of photos (and other metadata such as temperature, motion, etc…) that is gathered with the aim of cataloguing your life, or some particular events in it. The device used for photo capture is a Microsoft Research SenseCam, which is a small wearable digital camera (worn around the neck) that is designed to take photos passively (without user intervention). When worn continuously, a SenseCam will typically capture approximately 3,000 images from across your day, amounting to one million images per year.

We have access to a number of resources that will be used in this project:

• A million photo archive, with time/date, location and sensor data for each photo.
• An grouping of the photos of this archive into unique event (20 per day) whereby each event is annotated with the location of the event, the date/time of the event and all the lifelog photos that comprise the event.

The objective of this project is to develop a novel interface to access large visual lifelog archives. The interface will utilise a Wii controller, which is the primary controller for the Nintendo Wii console. This controller uses a combination of built-in accelerometers and infrared detection to sense its position in 3D space. Using the Wii controller will allow the interaction with the visual lifelog using physical gestures as well as traditional button presses. The controller can connect to a computer using Bluetooth. Development of the interface will take place on a desktop PC, though for demonstration purposes we envisage connecting the PC to a high resolution HD LCD TV.

The key focus of the project is to take the lifelog resources and develop a living room interaction scenario and interface to the lifelog using the Wii controller. There is no defined programming environment for this project, but possibilities include JAVA and FLASH. The project will involve co-operation with the AIC lifelogging and interface design researchers.

Relevance of the Project to "Technologies for Social Connectedness"

This project is very relevant to the theme of social connectedness. The motivation for the project is to bring the visual lifelog from a desktop computer environment into a social, game-like livingroom scenario, where many users could interact with the visual lifelog, thereby supporting social connectedness.

Demonstratable Outcome

The outcome of the project will be a visually engaging gesture based interface to & search engine for a visual lifelog. The interface will be demonstratable on a HD 40 inch LCD TV.

Supervisors and Mentors:

Primary Supervisor : Dr Cathal Gurrin
Postgrad Mentor : Liadh Kelly