Designing EyeTap Digital Eyeglasses for Continuous Lifelong Capture and Sharing of Personal Experiences Steve Mann, James Fung, Chris Aimone EyeTap Personal Imaging (ePI) Lab, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada {mann,fungja,aimone}@eyetap.org Anurag Sehgal Interaction Design Dept., Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Torino, Italy anurag@eyetap.org Daniel Chen Human Media Lab, Dept. of Computer Science, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada chend@cs.queensu.ca ABSTRACT Humans increasingly engage themselves in their compu- tational world as much as the physical world. Following this need for constant connectivity, computing devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and camera phones have become more wearable. We introduce the EyeTap personal experience capturing system EyeTap digital eyeglasses cause the eye to, in effect, function as if it were both a camera and display, by mapping an ef- fective camera and display inside the eye. Eyetap there- fore captures images exactly as they were originally seen by the user. Since sight is a primary sense this inter- face becomes intuitive and easy to use for continuous capture and sharing of personal experiences. This pa- per will discuss the EyeTap’s evolution over the last 30 years; some encountered design principles, the various EyeTap applications and future social aspects that may arise from EyeTap technology. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 User Interfaces: Input Devices and Strategies; H.5.1 Multimedia Systems: Artificial, augmented and virtual realities Author Keywords Lifelong Experience Capture, Cyborglogging, Design INTRODUCTION Vannevar Bush envisioned an age when storage would become so massive that it would allow us to record ev- erything in our lives [2]. Later, individuals such as Gordon Bell followed up upon the vision, which later gave birth to the MyLifeBits project [5]. Engelbart saw that the computer could augment human intellect [4] through this storage ability and its computational Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2005, April 2–7, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA. ACM 1-59593-002-7/05/0004. ability. With the development of wearable personal electronics, such as smart phones or personal digital as- sistants (PDAs)Engelbart’s vision has become closer to reality. Nowadays, it has become increasingly easier to capture and share our personal experiences with others, as seen by early mobile phone bloggers such as Joi Ito [6]. Unlike image capture devices before, these camera phones and other similar devices are becoming increas- ingly continuous in nature, recording large amounts of data at any point of the day. Many have described our growing integration with these continuously connected personal experience capture devices as the ”cyborg” era [11]. There has been a large interest recently in con- tinuous archival and retrieval of personal experiences, especially with wearable head-born or eyeglasses born systems. Dickie et al. ”eyeblog” eyeglass based video archival tool uses eye contact to edit the large amount of footage obtained from a continuous video capture system records upon eye contact from others with the user [3]. Meanwhile Aizawa et al. have explored ef- ficient video retrieval of large archived life logs based upon context and content from a head mounted video system [1]. Personally driven to explore new ways of seeing, EYE- TAP eyeglass devices have been invented, designed, built and used over the last 25 years [9]. Long term usage in day-to-day life has led to greater insights into some of the issues normally undiscoverable in a controlled lab setting. These design issues include not only the pos- sibilities offered by the device or its long-term effects, but also some sociological and humanistic factors such as how others react to such devices. BACKGROUND Traditional Lens-based ’Analog’ vs EyeTap Electric ’Dig- ital’ Eyeglassess Traditional optical (analog) eyeglasses have been lim- ited to modifying light by refraction of light. ”EyeTap” electric (digital) eyeglasses could also modify light com- putationally. With EyeTap eyeglasses, for example, in- stead of having to get new lenses ground, our eyeglass prescriptions could be downloaded over the Internet.