How many times can you recall either thinking or saying out loud, “Where are my keys?”  Personally, I can probably think of five times this past week alone.

Well, there’s a new gadget in the works that helps you out with those mindblocks by reminding you of the last time you saw it.  The device - dubbed “Smart Goggles” by their japanese inventors - is a set of glasses that’s hooked up to a small video camera and a small computer that attaches to your back.

You start out by spending an hour or two wandering around your home, and focusing on items in the house you might misplace, or need to rapidly find on occassion…keys, cell phone, wallet, etc… And everytime you focus on an item, you give the item a name by saying it out loud so the computer recognizes that your keys are your keys, your remote control is your remote control - you get the idea.

Then the next time you’re heading out the door and you can’t remember where you put your keys, you can just tell the computer to pull up it’s last registered memory of you focusing on it, by displaying the video footage into the glasses for you.  So these glasses are pretty much constantly keeping a record of the items you’ve registered with it, and the more items you program into the computer to recognize, in theory, the less things you’ll lose.  Seems to me even if it’s not actually the last time you had it in your hands (how many times do we toss the keys aside without looking at them?), you can probably start to deduce what you did following that memory.  For example, the last seen footage of my keys could include my hands holding a tub of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream that I bought from the store the day before.  I take a walk to the freezer, open it up, and voila - my keys, freezing cold.

This technology would probably be useful for seniors with memory difficulties, or anyone else with a tendency to be absent-minded from time to time.  Apparently the more sophisticated versions will be able to register names with faces - good for those awkward social situations when you know you recognize the person you’re talking to but can’t remember their face (and end up avoiding saying their name at all costs).

And I can see these glasses having educational merit as well.  If you’re a training botanist and you want to learn the specific genus and species of a slew of flowers - you can register these details in your glasses as you wander through a garden.  On a whim, you’ll be able to pull up the footage associated with the name.

Smart Goggles are still in the works to make them more practical for everyday use before the possibility of hitting the market.  As is the case with all technology these days, that means make the whole thing smaller.  The prototype version is quite bulky and is likely cumbersome for the user to wear and use.  But the developers, who are professors at the University of Tokyo, are saying in a few years, they should be able to downsize their gadget to a more sensible size.

Of course, if you have some trouble-making family members or roommates, this doesn’t take care of the possibility that they would go hiding your items on you when you’re not looking… The glasses can’t remember what it can’t see.

And this device certainly won’t be able to answer the classic question of “Where are my glasses?”