And then there was light

Walking the Horton Clockwise today I had intended to ponder constructively and informatively on the blood supplies mentioned in the last post. As it was I drifted off onto cameras, the sort of cameras that record everything you see, the sort of cameras used by some police forces to record tricky situations where there may well be disputes after the event about who exactly did what to whom, or who exactly said what to whom.

So I mount a camera on my head, connect it to a power source and off I go. Download it to Dropbox over night, every night.

But then I think it might be nice to stabilise the inbound image a bit and to have a spot in the recorded image which says what I am looking at, where the fovea (I think) is. Perhaps some arrows at the bottom of the image giving direction of head and direction of eyes in space. North, east, south or west. Up or down. We assume that both eyes point in the same direction for these purposes.

A date stamp and map reference for each frame as a matter of course. Perhaps a note feature so that I can make oral notes on the frames as I go along, for future reference. Although, thinking with my fingers, how would it know which frame you want to attach the note to? Would it just stick it wherever you were when you ended the note?

Getting more interactive, it might be nice to have a zoom feature so that I can say 'Cortana, zoom in' or 'Cortana, zoom out'. This might take one into the realm of one stream of images as they arrive at the camera and another stream of images as they are delivered to the eyes.

And moving into image processing mode, it might be nice to speed up the frame rate or slow it down, trading precision of movement detection for precision of feature detection. Or, at the extreme 'Cortana, stop recording' or 'Cortana, start recording'. Nicer still, if even when recording is off, Cortana still keeps a beady eye on things so that she can sometimes say 'Maybe it's time you started recording again, sir' or 'Don't you think you had better do something about the inbound drone at two o'clock, sir'.

Which all goes to show that a systems designer's lot is not an easy one. Maybe I had better talk to one of Kurzweil's chaps to see if it has all been done for me. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://www.kurzweilai.net/.