Some of you may still remember the absurdity of the early discussions of the life recorder and of the concept of recording your entire life on video so that you could later go back and revisit any experience you have ever had.
When the concept was later expanded to include the life stream, many people felt positively threatened by the concept. It took quite a while getting used to the idea of gathering every piece of personal data - where you had been, who you had met, what you had purchased, read and listened to - and storing it together with the life-long video recording in a "life stream" that containing basically everything you have ever seen and done.
You could say that the life recorder and the life stream hardly qualify as inventions. They are more like the predictable of the ongoing computerization of practically all aspects of our everyday lives.
In the early years of the millennium, the Apple I-pod gave an indication of the developments that would follow. At the time it was launched this tiny gadget would hold 40 gigabytes of data - allowing its owner to carry with him his entire collection of music and thousands of photographs. Meanwhile, digital cameras boomed, not least integrated as a standard feature in every mobile phone.
Next step was the so-called 3G mobile phones which not only offered broadband internet connection, but also made it possible to record the user's exact position at any time. As from 2008, most people had gotten used to having access to the full potential of the internet at all times no matter where they were.
The basic infrastructure for the life recorder gradually fell into place like the pieces of a puzzle. By 2020, the standard mobile terminal had a 100-terabyte memory leaving plenty of space to store an entire lifetime of video recordings. By then, the speed of the wireless connections had long since reached a level at which you would no longer notice if you stored and retrieved data from the computer's own memory or from the internet.
The technical challenge of creating the life recorder was neither that of recording everything nor that of storing the enormous amounts of data, but rather retrieving specific data once it had been saved.
The breakthrough of the life recorder as a practical everyday tool did not come until sufficiently intelligent automatic record analysis systems had been developed. Initially, the structuring systems were very rudimentary, largely based on comparing recordings with the individual's calendar. You would simply rewind to find meetings, birthdays, vacations, etc. based on the date.
Gradually, the systems grew increasingly intelligent. The recorder's software started registering sudden changes in the sound level, for instance, that might indicate if something important or surprising was happening. The systems also gradually started recognizing laughter, crying, arguments and caresses, and it began combining the many types of data in an actual life stream.
Today, the data are categorized with such precision that you can search any event of your life as easily as you search for a particular word in a text document.
We simply take it for granted that amongst the myriad of minor and major events of our lives, we can backtrack to where we lost our keys, review the painting we saw any given Sunday years back, the number of times you have tried putting a saddle on a horse or the number of times we have met one particular person.
The Early Examples
An early prototype of a liferecorder was the "casual capture" concept from HP, the computer conglomerate, dating back to around 2004. The user would carry a special, slightly heavy, pair of glasses with a built-in video camera.
The idea was to try and capture the many major events in life that would otherwise be lost. The first smile of the newborn baby, funny, breathtaking or touching situations - or maybe a crime you happened to witness.
Microsoft also contributed to defining the early sketches of the life recorder and the life stream. MyLifeBits project, sponsored by the US army as from 2003, was designed with the specific purpose of gathering and structuring the digital data any person leaves behind. The researchers at Microsoft used themselves as guinea pigs and gathered photos, recorded telephone conversations, saved all e-mails and recorded every website they ever visited, the books and magazines they read, the music they would listen to and the TV programs they watched.
Nokia's Lifeblog was yet another pioneer project from the same period.
Nokia was the world's leading manufacturer of mobile telephones, but the company's researchers already then preferred to use the term "mobile terminals" as they realized that telephony was increasingly being reduced to merely one out of a large number of functions available via the digital device that everybody would invariably carry with them at all times.
Nokia pointed to the fact that a mobile phone contained a large amount of data on the life of its user, and they looked into various ways of enhancing and facilitating the gathering of information, for instance by making it easier to record spoken notes, organizing pictures and video recordings via the telephone.