from Hacker News

AI camera with no lens

by anitakirkovska on 5/31/23, 3:49 PM with 89 comments

  • by belugacat on 5/31/23, 4:13 PM

    I can't find it now, but there was a prototype someone made in the 2000s of a camera that, when you pressed the shutter, would fetch an image on Flickr that most closely matched your GPS coordinates + time of day, acting in a similar way as a "crowdsourced camera with no lens".

    Fun to the see a modern reincarnation of that idea.

    (While digging around to find the above, I did find yet another camera project that does the opposite: "Matt Richardson's "Descriptive Camera" sends your pictures to Amazon's Mechanical Turk and jobs out the task of writing a brief description of each image, then outputs the text on a thermal printer. It's a camera that captures descriptions, not pictures." (https://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/descriptive-camera-prints-...)

  • by dmbche on 5/31/23, 6:15 PM

    If anything, this is a neat art piece asking "Why do people take pictures?".

    I've found often that the gut feel that makes you take the shot doesn't necessarily know when you have the right composition or what the subject of the shot actually is, you just hit he shutter, you know that this was the shot.

    Then, when looking at the shots, you have all the time and the world to analyse and find meaning and beauty in this sliver of an instant.

    By replacing this by a random seed, a 20 word prompt and gps localisation, I doubt that anyone would have a personal connection to the image, or to the instant it was taken. It become a "clean", "sanitized" image, that's only esthetic (or arguably memetic depending on your prompt), and is wholly separate from the person that took it.

    You also lose all of the information that you can not consciously perceive while taking the shot/writing the prompt, since you filter what you see through the lens of language, and then back into visual.

    It's neat !

  • by Solvency on 5/31/23, 4:07 PM

    Idea: AI police sketch artist.

    3D printed case. Resting on a table. Witness describes the suspect. 10 seconds later it prints out an AI generated ink sketch.

    I mean why not? Sell it through to every police station in your state. You can even put a cute little police badge emblem on the case.

  • by leononame on 5/31/23, 4:05 PM

    Cute and fun idea, but it'd be nice if it could take better indoor photos.

    Jokes aside, I think this demonstrates that AI generation isn't too great if you have something very specific in mind, at least it looks like the generated picture deviates from the real one, though it's impressive that it's still so extremely similar.

    The virtual one doesn't load for me unfortunately

  • by boo-ga-ga on 5/31/23, 4:31 PM

    Really love the concept. There also was a project with instant camera that draws cartoons based on what is captured: https://web.archive.org/web/20181003104348/https://danmacnis...

  • by manx on 5/31/23, 6:25 PM

    There was also a camera in 2012, which sent its picture to mechanical turk to ask for a description: https://hackaday.com/2012/04/25/a-camera-that-describes-a-pi...

  • by ayoreis on 5/31/23, 6:41 PM

    I thought this was going to be a more advanced version of this: https://petapixel.com/2022/05/04/newly-developed-camera-can-...

  • by dan-g on 5/31/23, 4:58 PM

  • by TheDudeMan on 5/31/23, 6:34 PM

    At first, I thought, "Cool, a sensor but no lens." Nope, no sensor.

  • by nonethewiser on 5/31/23, 5:29 PM

    I see no reason to consider this a camera. Its just an image generator.

  • by amelius on 5/31/23, 4:40 PM

    I guess you can take photos of the world and turn everything into a giant NeRF.

    https://www.plainconcepts.com/nerf-3d/

  • by vngzs on 6/1/23, 3:42 PM

    This should link to the original post, not link to a blog post about a Twitter thread that contains a link to the original post.

    https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/paragraphica

    The author's site is currently struggling to load, so here is an archive link:

    https://archive.is/mvfq2

  • by icepat on 5/31/23, 7:25 PM

    Interesting, but (to me at least) the point of photography will always be the technical process behind it, and capturing a _specific_ aspect of the environment. This will turn out fine generic images, but if you want to capture more, that's not something you can just synthesise.

    This isn't really a camera, it's a GPS hooked up to Stable Diffusion.

  • by yowzadave on 6/1/23, 4:23 AM

    Unfortunately the major weakness of this camera is the one thing I actually use my camera for: photos of my kids (and other people I know). But for stuff like landmarks, I never even bother taking photos of them—I’ll never take a photo of Delicate Arch that is as good as one million others I can find by doing an image search.

  • by peddamat on 5/31/23, 7:34 PM

    So it's basically a Samsung.

  • by bafe on 5/31/23, 6:01 PM

    The title is really misleading. I was expecting a camera without lens, using a type of light sensitive array and reconstructing the focused image using AI

  • by dist-epoch on 5/31/23, 5:46 PM

    Oh dear, see through cameras are about to become a thing.

  • by PinkMilkshake on 5/31/23, 9:41 PM

    Very cool idea. I wonder if the design is a reference to the star-nosed mole. Appropriate for a blind camera!

  • by m463 on 5/31/23, 9:31 PM

    this kind of technology is just what we need. It will always take a photo of the past, with more youthful self, hallucinated.

  • by m3kw9 on 5/31/23, 4:23 PM

    Even if you bring that back to the 80s they’d think you are doing witch craft if you showed this to anyone

  • by random3 on 5/31/23, 7:05 PM

    use-case, use with AR glasses to live enhance current location

  • by yieldcrv on 5/31/23, 5:04 PM

    exhibit a of how prompt engineering wont be a valued salaried skill, it is a valuable skill to create a revenue stream from

  • by sgok on 5/31/23, 4:23 PM

    it's like magic. incredible.

  • by teacpde on 5/31/23, 4:34 PM

    source site getting HN hug?