Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Computing devices such as personal computers, laptop computers, tablet computers, cellular phones, among many other types of computing devices, are increasingly prevalent in numerous aspects of modern life. As computers become progressively more integrated with users' everyday life, the convenience, efficiency, and intuitiveness of the user-interfaces by which users interact with computing devices becomes progressively more important.
The trend toward miniaturization of computing hardware, peripherals, as well as sensors, detectors, and image and audio processors, among other technologies, has helped open up a field sometimes referred to as “wearable computing.” Wearable computers are, generally, highly portable, and may be designed to be usable at any time with a minimum amount of “cost” or distraction from the wearer's primary task. That is, a wearable computer user's primary task may not be using the computer. Instead, it may be dealing with their environment while the computer plays a secondary, support, role. One such secondary support role may be the acquisition and storage (or capture) of certain data and/or media corresponding to a user's environment including, for example, pictures, video, audio, text and other such data. Note that such a secondary function need not be performed by a computer that is “wearable” per se; that is, other computing devices (e.g., other portable computing devices) may also support users' activities in a secondary capacity.
The secondary-task nature of such computing devices make them a natural match for computing applications that continuously run in the background, sensing their environment and occasionally proactively acting on behalf of their users. Nonetheless, to date, techniques for utilizing such computing devices, including the capture of environmental data in a preferable or desirable manner, are often considered inconvenient, inefficient, and/or non-intuitive by users. An improvement is therefore desired.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds