Hands up if you've seen the Robin Williams sci-fi flick Final Cut? If you haven't, then I'll explain the basic premise: Williams plays an editor who specialises in working with footage taken by in-brain cameras parents have fitted to their children in order to condense footage of an entire life into a single film loved ones can use to remember the dearly departed. And yes, it's pretty creepy.

Well, it seems that someone at Microsoft has been watching the same films as me and didn't quite get the moral of the tale: the company has designed a new wearable device dubbed Momenta for the NextGen PC Design Competition. Looking worryingly like an explosive collar from The Running Man, the idea is that the device uses a built-in camera to record your daily life to a running buffer. When it detects an increased heartbeat via its pressure against your neck it saves the buffer to a file so you can later view imagery of whatever it was that made you excited/happy/terrified.

Yeah. Because that's not likely to backfire at all.

“Honey, why is your Momenta filled with videos girls' bottoms on your walk to work?”

The device is said to “[capture] the best and most exciting moments of your life,” and uses a projected gesture-based interface to do its... Well, interfacing.

The device is clearly a pipe dream at the moment, with such specifications as a “200GB solid state molecular shift memory” and a button which projects a fully interactive PC desktop onto any surface available via a “extended cavity surface emitting optoelectronic chip-laser”. It does show, however, that companies such as Microsoft are clearly throwing not inconsiderable money at researching the next “big thing”. I'm just not quite sure this is it.

Would you like a video record of every moment of your life that caused your heart rate to rise, or is it a worrying trend in an already increasingly privacy-free world? Share your thoughts over in the forums.