One of the potential features of a ubiquitous computing environment is that it could be used to capture our everyday experiences and make that record available for later use. Indeed, we spend much time listening to and recording, more or less accurately, the events that surround us, only to have that one important piece of information elude us when we most need it. We can view many of the interactive experiences of our lives as generators of rich multimedia content. A general challenge in ubiquitous computing is to provide automated tools to support the capture, integration and access of this multimedia record. The purpose of this automated support is to have computers do what they do best, record an event, in order to free humans to do what they do best, attend to, synthesize, and understand what is happening around them, all with full confidence that the specific details will be available for later perusal. Automated capture is a paradigm for simplified multimedia authoring.
In Classroom 2000, the Zen* system was built with this capture problem foremost in the minds of the designers. The classroom experience was viewed as producing a number of streams of relevant information --prepared information presented as a sequence of slides, annotations on the electronic whiteboard, a series of Web pages viewed, what is said by the lecturer and what is seen by the students. The objective of the system was to facilitate the capture of all of these streams and the preparation of visualizations that allow a student to effectively relive the classroom experience. Many other researchers have developed similar note-taking or meeting capture applications [18, 12, 29, 24, 30, 9, 20, 7].
Cyberguide can also be seen as a capture problem. As a tourist travels from location to location, a record of what was visited, what was seen there, and even personal comments, results in a captured trail that can be revisited later. Various prototypes created a historian component with the responsibility of capturing significant events and preparing summaries that were then made available to the user in a variety of formats.