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Travel diary for the vacation season

doodledo

Lurker
Jun 10, 2013
7
1
UK
Our startup TecVis LP has released the Storica application in the market for processing and visualising your lifelogging experiences recorded with our AIRS platform, the most comprehensive lifelogging platform!

For the last year, I've been myself using both mobile apps for lifelogging, i.e., recording a large variety of mobile-centric data for experience and lifestyle purposes.

You can decide what to record and how (AIRS provides a lifelogging template that you can use if you don't want to bother configuring it all yourself). TecVis provides web pages with tips for recording as well as an online manual for AIRS to better tune the settings to your liking. It can record location (GPS-based), WiFi around you, BT devices, ambient noise level, all internal sensors (even the latest ambient humidity of the Galaxy S4), attached sensors such as the Zephyr HxM heart rate sensor, and many more (65 pieces of information are supported, according to the website). Widgets are supported for capturing own annotations during the day (e.g., what you are doing, what annoys you, ...) or your mood (through emoticons).

The Storica app allows for experiencing your recordings right on your phone. Location tracks are visualised using the Google Map v2 with fly-over maps of your daily track. Meaningful events (such as social comms, annotated events or calendar appointments) are gathered and visualised as 'stories of your day' with personalisable backgrounds based on spatial information and a context panel which shows you important context information at the time of the event (such as noise levels, light levels etc). A media gallery enriches your snapshots with context information similar to the stories. Overall, Storica is really cool for recollecting where you've been days or weeks ago, what happened around you, what did you annotate at that time, etc.

Given the vast information gathered, AIRS is free and open source so that you can inspect the gathering modules. No data leaves your device unless you specifically copy a backup (or sync, e.g., via Bluetooth)! The data remains yours, which is very important to me. Storica is free, too, for short-term memory recollection, i.e., looking back no more than 7 days at any point of time. Longer-term recollection (e.g., looking through your recordings from Christmas) can be purchased through in-app billing.

How's battery life? Recording like this does cost battery. I've been using AIRS now for almost two years and its battery usage has constantly improved. When executing the lifelogging template (which comes as standard), my battery consumption per hour increases from ca 1% (Galaxy Nexus on Android 4.2.2) to about 3.5% to 4%. If you use adaptive GPS and often hang around in places you marked in AIRS, this consumption goes down to 2.5% in those places (e.g., at work or at home). Hence, I can record all day without absolutely depleting my battery - and I often top up the battery in any case, even without recording.

Where does this all go? With many apps doing location recording, such as Saga or MyTracks from Google, AIRS goes one step further by widening the pool of information being recorded. It's hard to say where it will go. Is it useful? I do think so since I enjoy the recollections enabled by it, the evidence you can gather for yourself (e.g., pinpointing noisy situations and the stress impact it had on you) and the simple fun of having a fly-over experience of your last holiday ;-)
 
Not sure if you've seen these apps for lifelogging. AIRS is the recording part with lots of possible data to record (and comprehensive configuration), all stored in an internal SQlite database (no external server!).

Storica then visualises your recordings with cool fly-over maps for tracks and engaging multimedia stories with icons (click on them to see detailed data). You can dive into timelines and tag clouds. It's so cool ;)

Looking back on my days has never been so cool.

Battery life? You can survive a full day recording. Outside with GPS on all the time, it's about 3 to 4% per hour (my Nexus uses 1% anyways), while the adaptive GPS features reduces that for known WiFis to about 2% (you need to define the WiFi APs yourself, such as for work or home).
 
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Now that the vacation season has started, I played around with apps that allow for collecting a travel diary of some sort. Many focus on tracking your GPS (such as MyTrack from Google) or capturing a snapshot diary.

Eventually, I found the Storica app in the Playstore (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.storica), which builds on the recording platform AIRS (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airs). The pool of information that you can record is immense! Apart from GPS (it's got an intelligent mode that switches off GPS in defined WiFi APs), you can record from most built-in sensors as well as noise level, social communication (calls/SMS) and, of course, your snapshots taken with the camera. Storica visualises the recordings as a diary, which is appealing to me. It can summarise a day recording as a digital story, where certain events are pulled out of the recordings and snapshots around these events are presented in a multimedia format. Flyover maps are supported through Google Maps v2 and there's a context-enriched media gallery as well. And if that's too high-level, you can look through individual timelines and tag clouds, too.

It's really cool - try it out, just in time for the vacation season. Anybody who's got experiences with similar apps?
 
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I've been using AIRS (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airs) for nearly two years now, recording various aspects of my life. Now, the developer behind AIRS has published information that details all public APIs of the platform (which itself is open source), the database structures created and how to expand AIRS for your own purposes!

Check out the information at Developer Information | TecVis LP! It would be cool if we saw more AIRS-based apps (like Storica, which is already available in the market).
 
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We are happy to announce our Kickstarter project Storica! Extending our current mobile Storica, we aim at integrating desktop and mobile into the most comprehensive lifelogging experience platform out there.

But we will need your support! Check out the video to see what expects you and why you should back this project but also why you should spread the word to anybody you know. Only then will we succeed to bring you interesting experiences based on your own recordings of your days!
 
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