Only one in a thousand can be described as having “photographic memory”. These people are those who go to a place once and then can describe to you turn-for-turn how to get to the same place, what model car you drove, and even perhaps what clothes you were wearing on that day – even after a year. Well, perhaps that was a little bit exaggerated, but the opposite kind of person certainly needs no exaggeration.

Who hasn’t lost a key, a cellphone, a wallet? While the photo-memory guys will come up in an instant where he or she last saw the lost item, most of us struggle to separate our walking daze of a day into the last time we used our cellphone from when we set it down – somewhere. Thankfully, help is on the way – in the form of a prototype Smart Goggles developed exactly to combat this kind of memory problem.

                                             The bulky system will be miniaturized in the near future.

The prototype consists of a compact video camera and a small display placed in front of an eye, both connected to a back-pack computer with some very smart software loaded. The system works by memorizing common, everyday objects and doing continuous recording of your day – hence, it will serve as a kind of virtual memory that will not miss anything – if it remembers how it looks at least. The limitation of this design is in the object recognition – you’ll have to teach the system the names of each of the objects you predict will be misplaced in the near future, and even then the system can be fooled by having the object in a different orientation, position, or having some stuff added to the object (like adding a new keychain or some additional keys to your set of house keys).

                                             Testing in Tokyo. The Begonia plant is the focus of this particular demonstration.

The system once properly configured will be able to “tell” you (through in-screen text) where you (or it) last saw the item in question – by going through its memory of the recorded day. It should also work with faces and plant species – perfect for the budding botanist?

                                             Terminator vision: not far off? If you're looking for Sarah Connor that is.

The system looks awkward and is definitely not for the socially elegant – you may be able to avoid the embarrassment of forgetting the name that goes with the face you meet in a party, but these geeky glasses will offset that loss of embarrassment anyway. Researchers promise a prettier and smaller version in a few years however. In addition to helping the memory-inefficient along, this technology will also find use with Alzheimer patients or the elderly with failing memory. Photographic memory shouldn’t only be an in-born advantage; it’s about time that people (like me) have an option to boost this through technology. Now if only they made prescription versions, I’d be happy.