What would it take to record and entire life on video?

[Zenbach]

Imagine you were asked to build a system with today's technology capable of storing people's entire life on video. This request would be insane a few years ago only. I think today is already possible and pretty soon it may be a reality ( I know, scary.. ie: wife to husband: "Let's rewind an see where really were you last night? or an specific date 25 years ago?.. oops!) Let's assume video would come at same data rate as YouTube HQ video from a tiny camera (iPhone size) embedded into a person's forehead. Assuming and average life span of 80 years what kind of infrastructure, storage, costs would you estimate?

[Zenbach]

Here are some numbers to give you and idea of what it would take to record your entire life on video.

Assumed Parameters: - 80 years (average life span) - 1000 kbits/sec (YouTube video datarate) - $50.00/TeraByte

Solution: - 80 yrs * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 3600 sec/hour = 2,522,880,000 secs/yr - Total Secs in 80 yrs * data/sec = Total Storage required to store 80 yrs so: Total Storage = 2,522,880,000 secs/80yr * 1000 kbits/sec = 2.5 e+12 kbits for 80 yrs (1 GB = 8,589,934.59 kbits) in GB would be 293,701.89 GB for 80 years totalling about 287 TeraBytes (about 3.6 TB/year)

COST/Yr: at 3.6TB/year * $50/TB = $179/yr

TOTAL STORAGE REQUIRED TO RECORD YOUR ENTIRE LIFE: ######### 287 TeraBytes ###########

TOTAL STORAGE COST TO RECORD YOUR ENTIRE LIFE: $179/yr * 80 years = ######### $14.340 ###########

NOTE: This is an approximate value not considering that storage prices would be dramatically lower 80 yrs from today. Probably, to record your entire life 80 years from now would cost less than $1000.

[joshuarr]

Crap... if you could develop a decent compression algorithm that tossed out all the sleeping, masturbating, eating, wandering around aimlessly, sitting there stoned out of my gourd, and posting stupid stuff to the internet, I bet you could compress my 30 some years into about five.

[Zenbach]

I think your point makes a lot of sense. One of the sad things we would discover from that experiment is how the majority of the footage would be absolutely useless.. which to some degree would demonstrate how much time of our lives is spent doing useless or totally boring things. My guess is that in an average 80 year life you would be pressed to find more than 24 hours worth of "worthy", relevant, amusing, moments.. most of these moments only relevant to the person itself or friends or relatives.. Another interesting thing that this experiment would yield would be to find out how much time in total was really spent doing useful things, moments that were turning points on our lives, in which we were truly happy, felt accomplished. On the average? how much time would that add up to.. probably to less than 0.0001% of our lives.. pff.. how depressing.. I cam going to do something useful right now.

[idleworx]

i don't think we'll be truly able to build a system until technology comes up with a free floating personal video assistant. eg. a digital page to follow the squire around, floating above you or something like that. chip embedding might be another option i guess.

[Zenbach]

I think the technology is already available. Of course, not yet integrated into a functional system. The little iPhone like camera could be implanted on your forehead and powered by a tiny rechargeable battery embedded inside your chest (like a pacemaker) together with a miniature circuit. Video would be buffered on an internal 64GB solid memory and continuously transmitted via 3G network to a centralized storage facility. the 64GB buffer would be used when wireless was not available. With 64GB you could store about a day worth of highly compressed (YouTube video like at about 1000kbits/sec) of continuous video before you an out of memory. Hardware wise it could be mass produced for less than $100 bucks. Wireless costs would be expensive but as they go down in time more affordable.

[markca]

you should look at gordan bell's project/book at microsoft

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-09/p...

[Zenbach]

Thanks Markca, I was sure someone would be crazy enough to be attempting this already.