Every day since the start of November, Alan Kwan has logged his life via a video camera attached to his eyeglasses. And every night since then, he's taken those recordings and turned them into "memory blocks," bundles of recordings organized into discrete pieces.
The result is unique video game made from his memories -- a game that takes users "on a journey into [his] mind," GameScenes reports.
But Kwan, a filmmaker and media artist, doesn't intend the game, "Bad Trip," to remain a one-off for long: He intends to spread the technology he used to make it, including his self-designed program Memory Palace.
Memory Palace, Kwan explains, is something like "a hybrid of Sim City and iPhoto", where users can navigate a surreal 3-D virtual environment and build complexes to store their own memories. Kwan also eventually envisions a "Memory Market" where people could buy and sell memories.
"The cool thing with using POV camera to do lifelogging is that the users’ face very rarely appears in the videos...a player could buy a memory of kissing his dream girl from another player who has actually kissed her," Kwan told GameScenes during a recent interview.
He also believes lifelogging will soon become ubiquitous -- an idea greeted with far less skepticism now that the Internet's gone crazy over Diane Von Furstenberg's self-logging with Google Glass.
Once a rarity undertaken only by artists, activists and professors (think Wafaa Bilal, Hasan Elahi and Steve Mann) the hobby has now become affordable to any tech-head who wants to try it.
But users may find Kwan's ideas of what to do with the memories a little creepy; after all, judging by his currently-searchable lifelogs, the creator has a penchant for the bizarre. His YouTube uploads, besides "Bad Trip," include a beating heart clock and a short, self-shot film collage.
Users exploring Kwan's game "Bad Trip" can expect the following:
When you enter the game, the first thing you hear is heavy breathing. After a minute, you notice the breathing quickens pace when you walk, and slows when you stop. The world you wander is surreal. There are no colors: everything is displayed as chalky white outlines on black. The scene is pastoral, but the hills are the wrong shape, too sheer and too creviced. Bizarre entities -- beating hearts, people with trees for heads -- haunt the landscape. And everywhere there are houses, some waiting in valleys, some high atop cliffs, some floating in the sky.
These houses contain memories.
The most easy to find houses contain the most public of memories. Continue searching the world, and you'll find hidden houses containing memories more and more intimate. A house atop a surreal spiral staircase contains childhood memories, but players "often have to retry several times" to reach it. Secret memories are in the flying houses, completely inaccessible to players -- but climbing the highest mountains lets you listen to whispery echoes of audio as the houses pass overhead.
Watch the video above to learn more about "Bad Trip," and leave your thoughts in the comments section below.