Personal Black Box?

[jim bell]

 On Wed, 3 Oct 2018 05:04:21 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> >To be sure, this doesn't bring the dead guy back to life.  But I expect that in the large majority of cases, it would deter anybody who was thinking of killing the person with the PBB.  

About 1 3/4 years ago, I proposed that cell phones be programmed as "personal black-boxes" (PBB), a device to record events. The hardware was already there:  A person would wear a cell phone to collect video and audio data, more or less continuously, ultimately to protect the wearer from attack by others.  Not that  they couldn't attack, but that the presence of the PBB would provide evidence of actions by others.
Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers.  Consider the Rodney King incident from 1992    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb1WywIpUtY    , where a large crowd of cops surrounded Rodney King, who was being beaten by a cop.  Because someone in a balcony nearby happened to have a camcorder, the evidence was taken and King was exonerated, and at least some of the cops who were doing (or allowing) the beatings to continue.
And THAT was long before the advent of the Smartphone, which has the ability to record such assaults easily.   In the last few weeks, and really for the last few years, we have seen what the proliferation of portable video-taking devices can do.   Clearly, where video exists, justice can occur.  Where video DOESN'T exist, injustice can flourish.  So, I'd say that it's important to get the maximum number of people the easiest method to record incidents.  And that will need making it easy, cheap, and effective.  
Just about every smartphone out there has two, or three, or even four tiny component cameras.  Those cameras must be extremely cheap to manufacture, since there are VERY cheap smartphones, some costing $50 or less.  (So, I suspect that the cost of the camera would have to be $2 or less, in large volume. https://www.digikey.com/products/en/sensors-transducers/image-sensors-camera/532?k=camera   )     A single smartphone camera is good, but its camera 'looks', more or less, in only one direction in a time, And if you're not aiming in the right direction, you won't record the incident you want.  
I suggest that a tiny, omnidirectional camera system be built, perhaps containing 4 or 6 component cameras, airming in the horizontal plane,  able to record everything in a horizontal plane, mounted on your head just like a 'propellor beanie', famous from the early 1960's.  A cable will go down to a smart phone in your pocket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxhzahiQshQ    Maybe something like this already exists? It certainly ought to.
The main question I have is whether a smartphone has the capability to digitize (or at least record?) the output from as many as six HD cameras at a single time.  According to this:https://www.techspot.com/guides/1591-microsd-buying-guide/

"Additionally, SD specification 7.0 and 7.1 introduces two new card types: an SD Ultra Capacity (SDUC) classification which will bring support for cards with up to 128TB of storage, and SD Express, a joint effort with PCI-SIG to create SD cards that are compatible with PCIe 3.0/NVMe v1.3 protocols and will offer peak theoretical speeds of 985MB/s."

and later in the cite:

The SD Association approved the final microSD specification in July 2005 and those early cards only supported up to 128MB of storage -- a limitation that was expanded later by the SDHC and SDXC specs.
   
   - microSD: Max storage of 2GB, transfer rate of 25MB/s -- uses FAT12, FAT16 or FAT16B file systems
   - microSDHC: 4GB to 32GB of storage, transfer rates from 50MB/s -- typically uses FAT32
   - microSDXC: 64GB to 2TB of storage, transfer rates from 50MB/s -- uses exFAT
   - microSDUC: 2TB to 128TB of storage, transfer rates from 50MB/s -- uses exFAT
[end of cite]
A data rate of 50 MB/sec (if that really means 50 megaBYTES per second) is good, at least if the video is compressed.  But see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncompressed_video

                 Jim Bell







    
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