Facial Sca*notator

This is _so_ appropriate for the holiday shopping season.

I noticed that while I travel the public by-ways and highways, I am able to detect signs of stress on the faces of certain dazed shoppers. Specifically, when you are stressed enough to be open about your feeling, it seems easy to 'let out' the feeling by moving your mouth and by so doing make your feeling easily recognizable to any observer. This fact of life, coupled with the super-nice new 4gig SD chips hitting the market, leads me to believe that potential exists to exploit the reactions of everyday people in order to produce an engaging video tableau of facial expressions synchronized with your voice-over of what they seem to be saying -- in nearly real time.

Material needed: A digital video camera, preferably head mounted in order to "see what I see"; A digital media storage and file module; A voice microphone; A processor and operating system sophisticated enough to manage digital and audio inputs, to maintain a digital video loop of five seconds or so in length, and to store the video loop and audio files in permanent memory on command.

Mount up, and go out on the town. When you see a particularly memorable outburst, command your FS* system to capture the immediate loop and store it, along with your spoken account of what was said as an annotation. Later, when your storage is full of the day's action sequences, use your more well equipped A/V software at home to compile and sequence the voice and face files into a long-running and emotion packed rendering. Maybe this could be super-sequenced into a feature length film in a "how my day was not" series.