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Invent This Product

dilbertblog.typepad.com

14 pointsxirium17 comments

Sounds like a really good idea, actually. Even without the GPS tagging, you could input your travel itinerary and, based on that, build the scrapbook using the date/time stamps on the picture.

Dangit. Now my mind will be occupied by this while I facilitate my next meeting.

I am really looking forward to when GPS is included in most point-n-click cameras. This idea is brilliant, but nothing compared to what can happen when you look at what might happen.

I think GPS receivers (order-of-magnitude: $50?) are still quite a bit more expensive than, say, Bluetooth ($5?) or even Wifi ($10?).

It'd be easier to convince people to get a camera with BT/Wifi, and then have it silently ask your phone's GPS where you are. You could sell it as a fairly cheap way to offload photos without a cable.

In the .NET Rocks episode I mentioned in my other comment, Scott Stanfield mentioned a small, headless GPS receiver that you can attach to your camera. It has software that matches timestamps on pictures to the GPS location history and tags each picture with coordinates. It's a slick way to solve the problem while keeping your existing camera.

If the iPhone had a better built-in camera, I could totally see this happening with iPhoto. I guess the credit card thing is pretty easy to do if your bank allows statement export as XML or CSV (mine does).

OurDoings already auto-organizes by date, but don't expect an animated car moving along a map any time soon. The first GPS-related feature I'm likely to implement will be a privacy option that removes GPS info if the coordinates fall within a certain range (presumably near your house.)

Scott Stanfield talked about this on .NET Rocks (http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=348) and said that GPS readings aren't precise enough to worry about such fine-grained location. All of the pictures at home would show up as a cloud 100m in diameter centered on your house, not at their actual precise location.

That whole podcast is a good discussion about the intersection of software, tech, and photography.

Most people who would worry about the privacy of their home's location would worry about a 100m diameter approximation of their home's location.

Oh, duh. That makes much more sense now. :)

Good idea to include that!

What's the fun in that product? Half the fun is having the vacation and then the other half is telling the stories later and arguing with your friends/family over how it really happened.

I do like the GPS camera idea, I could imagine that as an integrated Flip-like product.

I would totally use something that used facial recognition to automatically tag all my facebook or flickr photos with my friends names/profiles.

Anyone here with facial recognition experience care to chime in?

It seems like there wouldn't be a lot of room for false positives in what you're suggesting. Assuming that the pictures aren't all passport photos (face-on, high resolution, uniform lighting), there would be a lot of hand-holding required on the part of the user to get high accuracy on the matches.

You could make the user interaction straightforward, with some iterative attempt at matching face A with profile picture B (if the user nixes the match, the program would note that and try again), but that's still non-trivial. I don't know that it'd be worth the trouble.

I'm imagining the interaction to be a little like a bayesian spam filter-- a training period, followed by occasional corrections.

The UX is key, as you indicated-- imagine a nice tight grid of matches for one person (each cropped to just the face area), and you can click each picture to toggle yes/no, with perhaps some more advanced interaction possible for algorithm-specific training (indicating angle, or eye position, or a sunglasses yes/no toggle).

It's actually pretty straightforward to detect a face; most mid-range digital cameras can do it nowadays. The problem is that even if you tell the program that face A is not face B, all you've done is given it a very small hint in a VERY big problem space. The human brain is hard-wired to detect faces (newborn babies prefer to look at pictures of human faces rather than colorful shapes), which I think makes it feel like an easier problem than it actually is.

That being said, don't let me stop you from trying. It would definitely be a cool (and very saleable) bit of tech.

I've done this with a few of my hikes (just the GPS->photo stuff) by cross-correlating based on timestamp. It's not that hard: http://technomancy.us/92

"The GPS from your camera would provide the approximate location"

I thought GPS had great accuracy?

The day my family tries to make me watch a detailed replay of their vacation to Buttfuck, Ohio on google maps is the day I burn all my technology and try to live with the Amish.

Giving this to the people who actually use it is like giving a drum kit to the kid of a friend. Everyone is going to hate it but the person using it. Never mind what dilbert dude wants, who wants to be constantly asked to look at crap like that? Isn't their enough distracting debris in our lives.

Invent something to solve a real problem.

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