Note: This is maybe more detailed and involved than needed, so apologies for the length of the post. But I’m submitting a similar version of this proposal for a Knight Prototype Fund grant, so I’d be grateful for any feedback or suggestions.

What is your project?
We are producing a series of multimedia diaries that take advantage of wearable technology. The core of the project is the creation of an app for Google Glass that automatically records 10 seconds of video every few minutes and automatically interviews the subject throughout the day by displaying questions and recording the answers.

For the initial phase of the project, we will choose participants with particularly compelling circumstances and loan them Google Glass, and a producer/editor will work closely with each subject to coach them through the process, explain the privacy implications, and obtain permissions where appropriate. The resulting Web videos will be short – just 2 or 3 minutes each – to give viewers a peek into the day in the life of another person, from their first-person perspective.

In a later phase, we hope to add a system that can automatically assemble the clips into a draft piece and let users do simple editing to cut or reorder the clips. That way, the wearable diaries can be created without the help of a human editor. The app will be free to encourage as many people as possible to participate.

Who is the audience for the project? How will they be impacted?
Our approach is modeled loosely on the Radio Diaries project, a non-profit effort that gives people audio recorders to document their lives (though we have no affiliation with that project). Pieces from the Radio Diaries project reached a wide audience through broadcasts on NPR stations and were also distributed online and were a critical and popular success.

We are reaching out to traditional news outlets (newspaper and magazine Web sites) for possible partnerships to publish pieces made through the Wearable Diaries project. We will also post the pieces on our own Web site, with the hope that those who watch one of the diaries will be curious to see others in the series.

The stories are simple in their structure, but we believe their impact can be profound. By documenting the lives of many types of people in a short and sharable format, showing the similarities and differences in a diverse group of people, we hope to promote empathy and understanding of difference – as well as simply telling compelling stories.

What has come before?
This project can be situated in a long history of “life-logging” efforts, which have been proposed since the earliest days of wearable computers. A 2006 Media Lab project called InSense, for instance, let users make personal multimedia stories with a bulky camera and computer strapped onto a user’s chest. (http://hd.media.mit.edu/tech-reports/TR-599.pdf) Our effort takes advtange of the latest technology, which is smaller and more discrete. It also stresses a journalistic approach to storytelling, and the involvement of a human editor to shape the final piece.

What assumptions will you test?
One key premise of the project is that wearable technology such as Google Glass can help journalists tell stories in new ways.

Specifically, we hope that wearable technology might solve two problems faced by journalists filming documentary pieces about interesting people. One, subjects often act more self-consciously when they are followed around with a camera, detracting from the authenticity of the story. Secondly, the reporter is often not with the subject of a story at key moments, leaving gaps in the final piece. We see Google Glass (and potentially other wearable devices), as a way to follow story subjects with a kind of robotic reporting assistant that will occasionally shoot video and even ask them questions about what they’re seeing.

Who is working on the project?
Jeff and Primavera are working together on this project for the class. We’re also working with Scott Greenwald, a PhD student in the MIT Media Lab. He works in the lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group and is a developer of WearScript, which allows rapid app development for Google Glass with Javascript.

What have you made so far?
We have created a rough prototype of the app using WearScript, a system designed to rapidly prototype Glass apps to test them. We have done a couple of initial tests and created a Web site outlining the project: http://wearablediaries.org/ Jeff also presented the idea at a Google Glass hackathon at the MIT Media Lab: http://bit.ly/weartalk

Taking the project further will require creating a more robust Glass app and purchasing Google Glass that are fitted onto less-conspicuous frames than the original design.