Working 9 to 5

Today marks the first day of my new job (for 10 weeks anyway), some will be thinking that Friday is a strange day to start working and indeed it is. I assume that I was asked to start today because it was the first of the month.

The project is as mentioned before about tagging photos with smells, something that has had little practical research done on it. The main idea is to use RFID tagged smell cubes to allow users to flag photos as being connected with any one or more smells. The tag (and smell cube) is waved across the RFID reader and this is used to tag the photos. The reverse is done to search through photos with the smell cube being used to identify the smells to isolate and the reader picking up the ID of the smells.

The first day went really well (apart from the extreeme tierdness from being up at 5:45 AM for my commute - something I will get used to I hope), with me looking into various photo browsing software and trying to isolate the appeal and faults of each for a task such as this and playing around with the Phidgets which I will be using for the RFID tags. The first four applications to come to mind (the first through Steve Brewster) are:

Both Elements and Flickr seem to be the lead runners as the other two don't seem to have any publicly available APIs (at least none that I can find). This could lead to either an Adobe Elements plugin or an application which uses Flickr as a back end to store and organise the photos. Time will tell which will prevail.
- Chris