VUPoints: Collaborative Sensing and Video Recording through Mobile Phones

Mobile phones are becoming a convergent platform for sensing, computation, and communication. This paper envisions VUPoints, a collaborative sensing and video-recording system that takes advantage of this convergence. Ideally, when multiple phones in a social gathering run VUPoints, the output is expected to be a short video-highlights of the occasion, created without human intervention. To achieve this, mobile phones must sense their surroundings and collaboratively detect events that qualify for recording. Short video-clips from different phones can be combined to produce the highlights of the occasion. This paper reports exploratory work towards this longer term project. We present a feasibility study, and show how social events can be sensed through mobile phones and used as triggers for video-recording. While false positives cause inclusion of some uninteresting videos, we believe that further research can significantly improve the efficacy of the system.