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Maybe they'll send it out in a text message to show where they are. It's just a kind of ritual behavior. The purpose is not to acquire a photograph of Famous Thing, because, as this invention reminds us, there are already photographs available. It's a bit more functional when your friends' heads are arrayed in front of the Famous Thing. The next iteration of this device should be able to superimpose the faces of your travelling companions.
With a gadget that could automatically gather a set of photos from the internet that matched the location, time of day, weather, direction, etc that you were experiencing at the time you could, theoretically, go for a walk around a city without having to interact with anything other than the people you're with, being completely in the moment and engaged with them the whole way, and still have a pictorial journal of the trip.
It wouldn't be impossible to automatically superimpose pictures of you and your friends in the images, correctly matching perspective and lighting.
Whether or not that would actually cause the memory to be stronger or not is hard to say without testing it, but most memories are remembered wholly incorrectly anyway so that might not matter.
First, you'd need to come up with some way to automatically judge whether a picture is "good" or "interesting" with some sort of reliability. That's probably hard, but maybe doable now. If possible, take a large picture and crop it down to something interesting.
Then, just leave a camera running continuously. Put it on your hat or hang it from your neck or something. Automatically save all the "interesting" shots. Then you have your pictures, but have been able to pay attention to what's going on around you rather than to the camera.
It probably wouldn't be that hard to do based on motion rather than vision if you can make a few assumptions, like 'people still relatively still to look at interesting things' and 'when people are facing each other they want to remember that scene'.
A year or so later, look back and see which evokes more of a memory. This would be subjective, unless you get wired up and/or stuck in an fMRI.
I am taking it, so that I can use it whenever and wherever I want, without being afraid of "copyright" holders. Not ideal, but hey, such is life these days.
Copyright is the quintessential first-world problem, I guess.
Instead, you travel to Paris to take the picture yourself :/
Also, nice phrase "life is a suffocating grind"!
EDIT: Sometimes it's enough to mention the author, sometimes you need to provide link to the license as well, etc, etc.
http://www.redbubble.com/people/christinebetts/journal/28082...
Read up for yourself:
All you need is a gyroscope, GPS and a button to press, right?
Yes, most museums ban flash photography (and there's some debate over whether flash photography will actually damage a painting). But go visit the (US) National Gallery some time and stand in front of Titian's "Feast of the Gods" or Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci (the only Leonardo portrait in North America). You'll see one flash after another, even though (in the latter case) there's a sign asking people not to. I've even seen, at another museum, a block cut of Munch's "The Scream" that had a cloth cover over it (that you could lift) to protect the work from light. No problem. People just lifted up the cloth and snapped a flash photo.
As for the rest of the paintings at the NG: Well, people can just go crazy. It's like visiting Harold Edgerton's laboratory.
I was so floored by this last time I visited, I asked the people at the desk about it. They told me that with few exceptions, you can flash away at anything you like as long as you're not using a tripod. You're free, in other words, to give your fellow museum goers a seizure; you just can't make money at it.
Think of how many children's group performances/event involve 2/3rds of parents present fiddling with their cameras rather than just watching.
I often go through with things in static protection bags, sometimes big bundles of LED strings and again nobody stops me.
I'm not sure if I'm happy because I don't have to explain the things in my bag or worried that they're looking for stuff so specific that someone with 1/2 a brain could build something that would get though easily...
Still, this is a cool hack.
If this is satire, it's great. If not...
You're out sightseeing without a camera. As soon as you're back in your hotel room you plot out the route you went on a map and get a photo album back.
What you show, on the other hand, is a product that would be best used by people who never want to leave their hotel, but just plot out their sightseeing route on a map and view all the great pictures of the experience they never had.
Allowing a user to set a temporal coordinate could have staggering results..
What did this block'building look like 50yrs ago?
Why are you taking this picture? It’s already on the Internet! - this is my thought every time I see a tourist taking photo of some random thing that has been photographed by millions of others before him. Sometimes, when I'm in a bad mood, I say "It's already on Flickr!" out loud when passing by said tourist.
When they shout back, "That's true, but this is a record of my personal experience here and I can use this particular photo as an aid to help me remember the feel of the weather, the color of the leaves, the details of this particular moment, from my particular vantage point -- and that's what's important, not just the fact that a million photos have been taken here before me -- this is my photo" do you stick around to listen, or do you just continue walking in a self-congratulatory huff?
I happen to be born without the gene that gives you the ability to derive emotional experiences from photos you made. Probably because of that, I don't enjoy "tourism" at all. No, I don't even grok it.