Eyetap: The EyeTap Personal Imaging Lab (ePI Lab) is a computer vision and intelligent image processing research lab focused on the area of personal imaging, mediated reality and wearable computers. Originally founded in 1998, it was formerly known as the Humanistic Intelligence Laboratory (HI Lab) at the University of Toronto by Professor Steve Mann. Its mandate from the beginning has been to research wearable computing and cybernetic concepts and to channel developments into practical, market-driven products and processes.
Steve Mann has also written Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer
Many of these ideas tie in with the MyLifeBits Project - Microsoft BARC Media Presence Group which is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.
The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.
The software research: Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder have developed the MyLifeBits software, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output.
