DOWNLOADING your life into a computer, once the stuff of science fiction, has become a reality. Microsoft’s British engineers are to unveil a miniature camera that records a person’s entire day and stores it in a computerised diary.

The SenseCam can be disguised as jewellery or a badge — but is powerful enough to retain up to 2,000 images and sound recordings of people and places encountered by the wearer. At the end of the day, the data is dowloaded to a designated home or office computer, creating a complete personal digital diary.

Microsoft believes the device could be its next blockbuster. Lyndsay Williams, the Cambridge-based Microsoft engineer who invented the SenseCam, describes the device as a “black box for the human body”.

She said: “It will give people the power to record their whole lives — allowing them and their descendants total recall of every significant moment, ranging from business meetings to time spent with loved ones.”

Critics, however, fear the reality will be very different with SenseCams becoming a threat to privacy and intimacy.

Next month Williams will give the first public demonstration of a prototype SenseCam at a conference in Cambridge showing its capacity to gather pictures of family, friends and complete strangers in the course of a day in the city.

The special camera has an ultra wide-angle lens that captures up to 2,000 images and data every 12 hours based on sensors triggered by changes such as motion, light, temperature, gestures or heat from a person in front of the camera. Microsoft says it will also help with everything from mislaid spectacles and forgotten meetings to the capture of handwritten notes.

The company says SenseCam is designed to appeal to the growing fashion for people to record every aspect of their lives. Digital cameras, often attached to mobile phones and hand-held computers, are already among the most popular consumer devices.

What makes SenseCam different is that it would come with software capable of organising and cataloguing the huge volumes of images and data it generates. It means users looking back at their diary could view images of almost everything they did, even years before, at the press of a button.

The device could give users the chance to record their entire lives — a new take on an idea already raised in The Truman Show, the Hollywood film starring Jim Carrey, in which the central character’s every move is filmed for a television programme.

Microsoft already has several researchers using such software to catalogue their every waking moment. One is Gordon Bell of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Centre in San Francisco who believes such devices can bring families much closer.

“This means you can get a real feel for what your children or parents have been doing that day,” he said. “It also works down the generations. My descendants will be able to see me, my life and just how I lived more accurately than ever before.”

Bell said that when he and Williams demonstrated SenseCam to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates he became so excited that he asked for prototypes to fit to his children.

However, some academics say there is little evidence that new technologies such as mobile phones and computers have done anything to make people happier. Dr Nick Baylis, a Cambridge University psychologist, said technology was often addictive but digital recordings were a poor substitute for living life to the full.

He said: “Recordings are mimicry. It’s not capturing the essence of actually living — it’s a poor excuse for living it wholeheartedly. We are mistaken to think that we get more from a moment by recording it.”

The modern trend for people to document their lives in ever greater detail has already been noted by researchers. Zoe Lazarus, a trend analyst with Ogilvy Mather, the global advertising agency, said her research showed that many people had become obsessive about recording themselves and their families, often accumulating many hours of recordings.

She said: “There is a whole new generation of people recording themselves and each other in intricate detail but interacting far less than before. In Japan where these technologies are far more accepted we have seen people becoming phobic about meeting face to face. They would rather send a text or e-mail.”

Others fear such technologies are a far greater threat to privacy than that posed by CCTV. A spokesman for Liberty, the human rights organisation, said that being repeatedly photographed and recorded risked making everyone’s life public property.

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