The Giz has a story about how an executive at Redmond is working on an application that will store and preserve real life images as they are experienced in a kind of searchable digital photo album. The “Sense Cam” interface for MyLifeBits, a project that uses “surrogate memory” which would sense something should be preserved and then take a digital still to archive it.

Gordon Bell, the head of Microsoft’s Media Presence Research Group, is heading up the project and he believes that many people spend more energy taking pictures and videos and are missing the every day joy of simply living life. The MyLifeBits application and hardware could free them to do just that. Along with the Senses Cam, a user could then use voice activated recording equipment and software to record simple keywords and paragraphs to help recall the image and experience later. And with the affordability of data storage getting cheaper and cheaper, Redmond envisions a day when a terabyte will be able to store all the images and sounds of a person’s life.

This may have some scary big brother feel to it, but it could also have valuable intelligence, military and law enforcement applications – much like the pistol cam – which could constantly preserve the images and details of encounter as they happen for analysis later.

Now all we need is a virtual reality interface to enable users to experience the lives of others. But that’s so Natalie Wood.