Isaac - the 1st camera phone turns 30

Isaac, the world’s first camera phone and wireless photo system, was deployed 30 years ago.? Congratulations to Bodil J?nsson, Lars Philipson, Arne Svensk, and their colleagues at CERTEC (Center for Rehabilitation Engineering) at Lund University in Sweden for developing this pioneering digital photography system.?

As they described in their 1995 paper, “Isaac combines in one unit a pen-based computer, a digital camera, a GPS satellite navigation receiver, and cellular phone channels for both voice and data”. [1] Professor Philipson was the chief scientist and project manager for the technical aspects of the project.? As shown in the figure, Isaac included a small handheld unit tethered to a shoulder bag which contained a single board computer and other electronics. The handheld unit was a touchscreen PDA (personal digital assistant) with a case that had been modified to include a miniature video camera along with a microphone and speaker.? The camera used a 1/3-inch format Sony CCD image sensor with 256 x 256 pixels.

The handheld unit connected to the shoulder bag, which included an image frame memory, two cellular modems for voice and data, a GPS receiver, an Intel 80186 processor, 1 Mbyte of RAM memory, and 256 Kbytes of flash memory. The strap for the shoulder bag included antennas for the cellular modems and GPS receiver. ?The power management unit included a rechargeable NiMH battery along with an accelerometer, which detected when the bag was stationary so the system could be put into sleep mode. The handheld unit even included an “off” control for the GPS receiver, which provided privacy when the user did not want to be tracked.?

The complete Isaac system included an image server at a support center, built on a Windows PC platform, for communicating with the portable Isaac units and for storing the camera phone images and data that was wirelessly transmitted from the portable Isaac units.? Incoming photos were marked with the name of the user and the date / time, and stored in a database.? The stored images could later be searched, and selected images could be printed as part of a photo album or diary.

At the support center, a Geographical Information System (GIS) produced a map showing the position of each user. ?In addition to the street address, it could provide overlay information showing the locations of nearby bus stops and public buildings.? The support center included personal planning and time management software, to help schedule activities for each of the users. For example, the support center could set an alarm on a user’s handheld device to remind the user of their bus departure time. On the Isaac screen, activities appeared as pictures or symbols ('pictograms') positioned relative to a vertical timeline.

The touch screen on the handheld unit displayed clear, simple pictures and symbols which were personalized for individual users. ?Users could make phone calls by touching one of the icons on the screen depicting the face of the person to be called. They could take pictures, using Isaac's digital camera, to document their day.? They could also send their pictures to the support center, to get help with questions or concerns about things they encountered during their travels. The GPS receiver enabled both the user and the support center to understand their location.

The most interesting aspect of the Isaac system was the users it was designed for.? Named in honor of Isaac Newton, the system was created not for wealthy technology aficionados, but as a personal assistant for the differently abled.? It was conceived by Physicist Bodil J?nsson, who believed that differently abled people could communicate if they were able to use the language of pictures. ?

Work on Isaac began in October 1993 at CERTEC, which partnered with several group homes for adults with cognitive dysfunctions in Lund, Sweden. [2] The goal was to enable differently abled individuals to live more independently, by making it easier for them to communicate. By the end of 1994, CERTEC had built and deployed 25 Isaac units, which transmitted voice, photos, and GPS data to the image server at a support center.? Note that the popular press has mistakenly credited a different individual with being the first to send a digital photo via a mobile phone in 1997, several years after Isaac was deployed. [3]

The Isaac image server stored each user’s photos, which could then be searched and printed. The printed photos were bar coded to allow the corresponding digital images to be retrieved in the future, and mounted on rolls or in albums which were viewed by the users. [4] Isaac was featured in the January 1998 episode of Scientific American Frontiers on PBS, hosted by Alan Alda.? He first tried talking with one of Isaac’s users, and then realized that he could best communicate with him by pointing to some of the pictures that the user had taken.?[5]

After creating the Isaac system, the research group at CERTEC continued to study how to use digital pictures to help people with disabilities communicate.?[6] Their work on Isaac had demonstrated that “taking pictures for free” using a camera phone led to a variety of different uses for these pictures. ??Some Isaac users quickly amassed thousands of pictures in their collections. Today, digital pictures are sometimes used to preserve special moments, but are mainly used to document or share a wide variety of ordinary “images as information”.

In a 1998 publication, J?nsson, Philipson, Svensk described the many lessons they learned from the Isaac project.? These lessons included “you cannot know until you’ve tried!” and “the picture’s importance to accessing the past cannot be overemphasized”.? In a classic understatement, J?nsson and Svensk had written several years earlier that “although targeted for a special application, Isaac has the potential for a much wider use”. [7] Indeed, the mobile photography system they pioneered is now used by billions of people around the world.

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References:

[1] J?nsson, B., Svensk, A. (1995). Isaac – A Personal Digital Assistant for the Differently Abled. Proceedings of the 2nd TIDE Congress (Paris, France, April 1995), pp 356-361, available at https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eNpiStR-kcYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA356 and at https://web.archive.org/web/20021221100959/https://www.certec.lth.se/doc/isaaca/

[2] J?nsson, B., Philipson, L., Svensk, A. (1998). What Isaac taught us. Certec, Lund University, Sweden, available at https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/files/5338557/3910505.pdf

[3] 360 on History - How the first photo was captured and sent by phone, see https://www.360onhistory.com/history/how-the-first-photo-was-captured-and-sent-by-phone/

[4] J?nsson, B. and Plato, G, Art and Science – A Different Convergence, CERTEC Internal Report, Lund Institute of Technology , No. 1:2001, available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20031021055146/https://www.certec.lth.se/doc/artandscience/artandscience.pdf

[5] J?nsson, B., Philipson, L., Svensk, A. (1998), p. 4-7.

[6] Danielsson, H. and Svensk A. (2001), Digital Pictures as Cognitive Assistance, Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE), Ljubljana, Slovenia, Sept 3-6, 2001, available at?: https://l3dswiki.cs.colorado.edu/clever/uploads/16/digitalpictures%20isaac.pdf

[7] J?nsson, B., Svensk, A. (1995), p. 358.