Real time operational photography

As some of you know I’ve been heavily engaged in the Coast Guard’s approach to Web 2.0 and social media. On Friday, 17 October, the Commandant spoke to Federal News Radio and said:

“How much applicability is there regarding this type of technology and aggregation of social behavior to actual operations in the Coast Guard? If you think about video and imagery that can be translated immediately to blog sites and Web sites, the potential implications for how we might monitor a search and rescue case in the future -- if we're able to put that kind of technology out on our small boats is pretty fantastic if you think about it. - ADM Allen on Federal News Radio”

Inspired, I called up Ken Babick and got a crew spot on a training mission on Saturday, and started working out how to use my iPhone to post images to the web while underway. Within an hour I had a process prototyped and at 10am Saturday morning we hit the water and started taking photos. These photos were then uploaded in real time and within 90 seconds – 2 minutes were available on the web as blog posts.

The blog can be seen here: http://cgblogtest.blogspot.com/

The process I used is as follows:

1. Turn on the iPhone
2. Load the photo application
3. Take a photo
4. Decide if it should be uploaded
5. Choose "Email" from the photo application which opens the email application
6. Choose the Flickr address from contacts and send the email

Key learnings from the test:

1. The process worked, it took about 90 seconds to two minutes from turning on the iPhone until I was able to confirm the photo had appeared on the blog.
2. The first minute of this time my full attention was on the iPhone, I wasn't really focused on doing anything else, situational awareness was significantly lowered (we intentionally put me on the target vessel where I was extra crew).
3. A custom application would be really nice, on where I could shoot the photo and then press one button to accept it and send.
4. The GPS coordinates were very accurate except for 3 cases (15%) where the locations were off by up to a mile: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31516772@N06/map/ 
5. The email process I used would allow me to add notes but I did not do so. Again a custom application would be nice, one that would allow you to preset the facility number, coxswain name, order number, email addresses to send to (Command Center, Intel, the Aux Ops officer) etc. for inclusion in the email.
6. This is all dependent on 3G or EDGE network connectivity so it is a near shore approach. The iPhone will store images with geodata for uploading latter but this takes away from the benefits of near real time imaging.

Obviously there are some issues regarding security and privacy to be worked out but overall this was a success. Over the winter we’ll be experimenting more. If you’ve used a camera phone during operations to send images I’d love to hear about your experiences.

www.flickr.com Go to cgblogtest's photostream