Cathal Gurrin & DCU (IE)

Colour of Life Wall

Sensing the Colour of Life, 2006 - 2015

What if we could see exactly what lights up our lives, and explore the colours that comprise our everyday experience? Wearable cameras can create a detailed visual archive of a person’s life, activities and experiences. The INSIGHT Centre for Data Analyticshave developed a visualisation technique that can capture how a person’s lifestyle varies with changing days, weeks, or years.

This incorporates their Colour of Life algorithms, which can represent an overview of millions of images within a single visualisation. The algorithms focus on the relationship between lifestyle and colour, by capturing the colours to which we are exposed in our lives (and captured by images), collating similar colours for specific time periods and depicting how those colours change over time with a flowing timeline.

Dublin City University has been actively involved in lifelogging research since 2006. Their work has used a variety of wearable sensors, from the Microsoft Sensecam wearable camera to Google Glass. The DCU lifelogging lab, at the INSIGHT Centre for Data Analytics, is continuing to develop state-of-the-art lifelogging technologies seeking interdisciplinary partners to apply their technologies to solve real-world problems.

About Cathal
I’m a lecturer at the School of Computing at Dublin City University, leads the lifelogging research group, and is a Funded Investigator in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. My research interest is personal analytics and lifelogging, or ‘a search engine for the self’. I also have an interest in information retrieval and a particular interest in how people access information from mobile devices. I have gathered a digital memory since 2006 that includes over 15 million lifelog images, and hundreds of millions of other sensor readings. I regularly contribute to international media outlets.

@cathal
computing.dcu.ie/~cgurrin/

Cathal Gurrin wishes to thank Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland for supporting his ongoing research.