From Tuesday’s Yomiuri Shinbun IT section comes an article about a project that seems to have so far escaped the radar of non-Japanese web watchers (at least in so far as a Google search turns up):
LifeSlice, which proudly proclaims itself as “first true blog” and features a great logo fashioned out of the word “blog,” is from what I can tell a site aggregating moblogs created with the same type of camera and blogging software. It’s run by the LifeSliceLab, a group with about 10 members, and kosby.com, the home page of which indicates it’s an “Incubation & Investment Company.”
As best as I can garner with my sorry Japanese — and with Naoko recently having resigned her post as Minister of Translation — the folks who are creating these moblogs (presumably just the members of the “lab” at this point) are using a low-res digital camera which automatically takes a picture at predetermined intervals (say, every 5 minutes). Take a look at this representative page from user Takanashi, of yesterday’s blog (be patient, these pages take a while to load), and you can see better what I’m referring to. If you click on the various links at the upper left of this page, you can display the images in varying ways.
The camera device is a Mach Power SVX produced by NHJ Limited, a company specializing in cheap, small, and lightweight digital still and video cameras. It features 300,000 pixel resolution (the same found in many camera phones, such as mine), a self-timer function which is what the Lab is apparently rigging to act as an intervalometer (this function may be built into the camera, not sure), and is able to function as a web camera, which is no doubt being used by LifeSlice to get the camera to act as a moblogging device. At present, for the setup to work, the camera has to be tethered to a computer or laptop, though it seems that the collective is working on an original camera which won’t need to be connected by cable to a computer.
The “What’s LifeSlice?” link isn’t working, but this page and others linked from there attempt to explain the project, if you can read Japanese. From what I can determine from those pages as well as the Yomiuri article, the project was started in May of this year, and already they have won some awards (from whom?), including one for a “life slice calendar” which apparently featured 8000 pages of LifeSlice images taken by a salaryman wearing the camera for 3 months.
Yet another flash in the pan techie project or something that’s got legs? Yet another step forward to the ubiquity of computing or another nail in serendipity‘s coffin? Who knows? But LifeSlice seems like something more folks should know about.
