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ASSIGNMENT 1: PROJECT PROPOSALProject
Members
Digital photos have become an integral part of our lives. Digital camera use has overtaken that of film cameras and continues to grow. A recent Business Week article reports, “After surpassing sales of film cameras in 2003, the demand for digital devices continues to swell. According to market research firm IDC, during the first nine months of 2004, U.S. shipments of digital still cameras grew by close to 50%, vs. the same period in 2003.” Nevertheless, collections of digital photos are difficult for many people to manage. This difficulty stems from a number of factors:
Addressing this issue is essential since digital photographs represent an important way people communicate with one another across distances and across generations. Without effective ways to sort, filter, and organize digital photographs, this rich source of information has little value. As people accumulate more and more digital photos, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of the ones that have special meaning. Our project attempts to solve this problem by creating an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for managing digital photos by means of their metadata. We aim to focus on metadata that is assigned to photos automatically at the time of capture to minimize inconvenience to the user.
For users, we plan to select from colleagues at SIMS, family members, and non-SIMS friends. We're basing our project on the Mobile Media Metadata 2 (MMM2) system. Many SIMS students worked with this system in IS 202 and most likely have opinions about its strengths and weaknesses. Initial Design DescriptionThe MMM2 camera-phone system developed by Garage Cinema Research will serve as the basis for our new tool. MMM2 enables camera-phone users to automatically tag their digital photos with metadata at the time of capture. After tagging, the system automatically uploads the pictures to a Web server, from which those pictures can be viewed and shared. We will use the MMM2 database as the source of our photos and the MMM2 Web-based interface (see images below) as the starting point for our own interface. Our system will build on MMM2 by allowing users to automatically sort, filter, and manage their photo collections based on the metadata associated with the photos. This metadata includes time and date of capture, place of capture (based on cell ID and GPS readings), the owner of the photograph and individuals co-present at time of capture (based on Bluetooth-based sensing). Depending on the outcome of our user assessment, we may also allow users to organize photos in their collections based on the number of times the photos have been viewed or shared. Such information--which is tracked by MMM2--represents metadata that is associated with photos after their time of capture. By allowing users to sort their photo collections based on the metadata, we aim to provide a better photo-management solution compared to many applications currently on the market.
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