Digital photography innovations have led to cameras that can capture images at the speed of light, see the world from the compound eye of an insect or describe scenes via speech for the visually impaired. Some of these strange and amazing digital cameras will even remember your preferred settings using iris recognition software, spit out descriptive text with the help of virtual workers around the world, or activate only at the touch of strangers.
1. Touchy Camera for Social Anxiety
The wearer of this odd-looking camera helmet is entirely in the dark – literally - until touched by another person. When continuous physical contact is maintained between the camera, ‘Touchy’, and an outside person, the eye-hole shutters are activated. This gives the wearer back his or her own vision, and captures images every ten seconds.
The creators note that we’re all separated into social bubbles, avoiding connection with strangers. “However, technologies like internet social networking or the mobile phone loosens social boundaries, hence dehumanizing physical communication. to a certain extent, it generates social anxiety such as the one experienced in the ‘hikikomori’ and ‘otaku’ cultures in Japan. Touchy criticizes this phenomenon and suggests a solution by transforming the human being into a social device: a camera. the touchy project investigates how such a device improves social life, presupposing that a camera is a known tool for sharing memories, valuable moments, enjoyment, emotions, beauty and so forth’.
2. Iris Camera
Iris is an eye-tracking camera that you control by blinking and squinting. It uses biometric technology to recognize users’ faces through their unique iris signatures, automatically loading their preferred settings including aperture, ISO and screen display.
Zoom in and out by widening your eyelids, and take a photo by holding your gaze before double-blinking.
3. Panoramic Camera Ball
This incredible throwable camera captures photos of scenes from thirty-six individual lenses to create a continuous spherical landscape.
The modules are mounted in a 3D-printed enclosure resembling a soccer ball, which is padded with foam and contains an accelerometer that helps predict rise time to the highest point of a throw. At that point, the exposure is triggered. Once the ball is caught, pictures are downloaded automatically via USB and shown in a spherical panoramic viewer so you can explore the full representation of the scene.
4. Descriptive Camera
Imagine having an army of virtual slaves at your command who help you organize your photo collection by printing a description of what each picture contains. That’s essentially what the Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson achieves, taking advantage of people who perform menial online tasks for a few pennies at a time via the Amazon Mechanical Turk API. You take a photo and a worker receives it instantly via IM, typing up a description that the camera will then print on a receipt.
The whole process takes three to six minutes, and the quality of the description may vary. One example: “Looks like a cupboard which is ugly and old having name plates on it with a sturdy lamp attached to it.”
5. Eye Ring: Camera for the Visually Impaired
This little gadget could help the visually impaired ‘see’ objects that are difficult for them to distinguish, identifying currency or reading signs. It could also help children during the process of learning how to read. You simply point the EyeRing at an object, hit the shutter release, and receive a verbal response from a Bluetooth-connected device like a smartphone or tablet.
6. Camera Modelled on a Bug’s Eye
Inspired by the compound eyes of insects, researchers have created a digital camera that can capture a 160-degree-wide field of view with all areas of the photo in focus. Tiny domes on the camera are covered in 180 microlenses, each of which capture a unique view. The team is hoping that as manufacturing techniques advance, they’ll be able to mimic the eyes of other creatures as well, like houseflies and shrimp.
7. Ubi-Camera
The Ubi-Camera allows you to use your fingers as the viewfinder and capture photos with hand gestures.
Developed by Japan’s Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, the camera allows people to take photos more intuitively while looking at the actual scene instead of through a viewfinder.
8. Human Eye Camera
It may not look like much, but the revolutionary feature of this device is that it’s able to tilt and pan a small camera robotically in a way that mimics human eye movement. It features three degrees of movement and can move at 2500 degrees per second, 2.5 times faster than our eyes.
9. Sling Shot Camera by Sung Young Um & Jung Eun Yim
The idea of this fun slingshot camera is to catch subjects entirely by surprise - “No more nice looking pictures.” Forget about allowing your friends and family to prepare for the photo, adjust the angle of their body and smile. You pull this device, which looks like a slingshot, out of your pocket, and people will make faces, duck or shield themselves with their arms. But pulling the elastic band sets off the shutter rather than hurling something at them. A USB port on one end of the camera handily downloads the photos to your computer.
10. Camera Mounted to a Drill
What’s the point of a camera mounted to a drill? Well, in this case, it’s capturing a dizzying work of art.
The camera turns ordinary scenes into works of abstract art in swirling lights and colours.
11. Periscope-Shaped DSLR
‘Shoot from the hip,’ literally, with a periscope-shaped DSLR by Yaniv Berg. This camera angles the viewfinder in such a way that you can capture subjects from natural, intuitive angles while still maintaining control over the composition.
12. Speed of Light Camera
This crazy camera developed by the MIT media lab has a shutter speed of one trillion exposures per second, allowing it to record light traveling from one point to another. They used it to capture an image of a laser as it passed through a soda bottle. Check out the video to see the results.
13. Bushnell Image View Digital Camera Binoculars
Wildlife photographers know how frustrating it can be to witness an incredibly photogenic moment that passes by in a split second, but have no time to switch from binoculars to their camera in order to capture it. Bushnell’s combination binocular-cameras capture both still images and video with the push of a button.
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