Here's something we'd like to see get past the prototype phase: Descriptive Camera, a project by NYU student Matt Richardson.
Descriptive Camera turns the concept of a traditional Polaroid on its head. When you use it to take a picture, what it produces isn't a photo but a text description of what the photo would look like. It's a kind of quirky, Dada-ist exercise that we can't believe no one has thought of before.
To make it work, Richardson rigged the camera to beam its image data to actual humans working remotely as a part of Amazon's Mechanical Turk program (we hadn't heard of it, either). The Amazon workers write a brief description of what they see in the photo and then send it back to the camera. The camera then prints out the description on a sheet of paper about the size of a receipt. Wait time? Six minutes or less.
Aside from its potential as a fun party trick, Richardson suggests the Descriptive Camera concept could be used to supplement traditional shooters. A camera of the future, for instance, might produce both images and descriptive information about their contents.
[via Buzz Feed]
