[travel] The other convergence ... cameras, photographic memory, and more

[mattbell]

At home I enjoy having a phone that puts the world's knowledge in my pocket via the internet. My needs while traveling are slightly different, though. I still want to have as much information in my pocket as I can. However, much of that information isn't online. It's in tour books, maps, and other places. So I've developed the habit of using my nice camera to take high-resolution pictures of anything that I might need. I can take a photo of a wall-size city map, and then later read every fine street detail of it by zooming in on the glorious 9-megapixel photo on the camera. I have pictures of road maps, subway maps, monument maps, directions, the sign for my hotel (for showing to cab drivers), flight information (for getting into airports without a printed pass), mysterious foods that I'm hoping the hotel staff can identify for me, restaurant listings, webpages with informaiton on visiting some attraction, emails from friends with information on what to see in a city etc. I'm lazy now... I will take pictures of six-digit flight confirmation codes. It's easier than haviing lots of pieces of paper floating around. The photo trick saved my ass in the nightmare package scenario I described earlier.

I quickly discovered that it's much better to be standing on a third world street corner looking into your camera than it is to be on the same street corner with a giant unfolded mess of a street map or an opened tour book. Basically, the latter two scenarios are basically like a big sign saying “I'M A CONFUSED TOURIST! CONVICE ME TO ENTER YOUR HIGH-PRESSURE RETAIL ESTABLISHMENT AND HAVE SOME TEA!” As a result, I sometimes photograph entire sections of the tour book so that I can look quietly at them in public. In addition, some of those tour books run over 1000 pages and will weigh you down. It's silly to carry a 1000 page book for one two-page spread of a city map and some listings.

I usually still carry a street map as backup in case my battery runs out. It also lets me spread the meme whenever I can.

For example:

Confused, Sad, Lost Christian Fundamentalist Tour Group Kid: (about 18 years old or so) Hey, my group ditched me. Can you help me? I'm trying to get back to Zion Square.
Me: OK. Do you have a tour book?
CSLCFTGK: No. (think of a really sad voice)
Me: Do you have a map?
CSLCFTGK: No.
Me: Do you have a camera?
CSLCFTGK: Yes.
Me: Here's what youre going to do. Take a picture of my map. Now you have my map too. That's where you need to go.
CSLCFTGK: Thank you for being here, by the grace of God. God bless... uh, I mean, Jehovah bless you for helping. It's okay whatever you call your God.
Me: ...

What I'd really like is for camera vendors to make this note-taking more organized so that I can make the notes searchable. I want the ability to tag, or better yet, use optical character recognition, so I can quickly search for text strings in my database of notes.

That's just the beginning. I want the camera to translate signs in pictures I take from foreign alphabets into English. Then I can photograph menus, signs, notices etc and then read them in my native language. I want a GPS on there along with street maps of the world so I can always know where I am and mark locations of places of interest. I want to download tour books directly to the camera. Furthermore, I want to be able to effortlessly put little notes and reviews for things as small as a street food vendor or a nice place to get a good view, and be able to see sites others have reviewed. There are both hidden treats and scams in all these exotic cities, and I want to know about where they are. I want to have a smart mob of tourists labeling the highs and lows of an unknown country. Many of these ideas run into the territory of the sort of thing that's being developed for the iphone, but the iphone has a crappy camera and international internet access is limited.  So why not put all that stuff on my good camera so that I can have it work on the data I'm gathering as a tourist?

Comments

[neoteny.livejournal.com]

Me: Here's what youre going to do. Take a picture of my map. Now you have my map too. That's where you need to go.
CSLCFTGK: Thank you for being here, by the grace of God. God bless... uh, I mean, Jehovah bless you for helping. It's okay whatever you call your God.
Me: ...


"Science!" :P

[doublefeh.livejournal.com]

I just used this trick twice today in DC.

Great ideas! And a question:

[(Anonymous)]

Those are some great ideas. I'm going to have to think "camera" more often.

I'm curious about one angle of it: Do you have some kind of printer with you? Or do you just do everything on the camera display or a laptop (can't remember now if you have a laptop along). For example, with a photographo fyour hotel for a cabdriver, do you hand them your camers or who them the screen? Or have you printed something...

Thanks for elaborating on how you use the camera, and for posting about your travels (good vicarious traveling).

Sheesh

[(Anonymous)]

Show them the screen, not "who" them the screen. For Pete's sake.

Re: Great ideas! And a question:

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

I do have a tiny laptop (EEE PC 901) but no printer. Printers are large and produce printed material, which I then need to keep track of separately. It's easier to just show the cabbie the camera.

[aaangyl.livejournal.com]

You want like a locally-embedded Evernote in your camera. That shouldn't be too much of a stretch in the not too distant future, really.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Basically. That plus image search functionality, Babelfish, and the ability to share with other users.

[kathryn-ironic.livejournal.com]

I've been using my camera more and more for things like this while traveling (*not* a cameraphone-- far, far too slow, and the optics fail in lower light, i.e. when you're taking a photo of a map indoors)

--copies of maps and guidebooks
--train, bus, and boat schedules & maps
--a quick photo of starting points ("the side of the train station where I found the bus") = digital bread crumbs
-- as a photocopy machine in libraries
--copies of menus so I can remember what I'd had later on
etc
--backup copies of electronic documents = photographs of my computer screen