Technologies like Tabula Rasa and JLBT suggest and support new ubicomp applications. The tools and products created to envision the research goals thus enable other kinds of capture and playback scenarios. For example, the live capture and playback of ourselves is something that most people are only familiar with through the use of a mirror.

Imagine being able to learn a dance from a video while seeing yourself in the video, perhaps from an angle that is impossible with ordinary mirrors. Now add the ability to slow down the video, or loop difficult segments, and you have a generalized tool for learning actions and skills.

Mimics is planned to be such a system. Mimics can capture the demonstration of a skill, either explicitly or through a performance, with the intent of other people later learning the skill. The Mimics interface will incorporate concepts such as digital mirrors, capture, access, and time stretching to aid in the learning of a action by imitating it.

Again, like Tabula Rasa and JLBT, Mimics has been prototyped (figure 4) and has been accepted as a demo for an upcoming public workshop at Gresham College on capturing life experiences.