A camera which
produces written descriptions of scenes rather than photographs has been
invented by a student in the USA. The device uploads pictures to the web which
are described within minutes by users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. The
short description is then sent back to the camera and printed. It was developed
by Matt Richardson, an Interactive Communications graduate student at New York
University. "I'd been thinking a lot about how cameras capture a lot of
metadata when we take a picture: the location where you are, it captures the
date, the camera make and model," he told the BBC. "A lot of information,
but most of it's not really useful or has limited use."
Menial tasks
The machine uses
a BeagleBone, a tiny computer used to power prototypes and other experimental
computers. It links up to Mechanical Turk, a service in which people can
perform menial tasks in exchange for small sums of money. The printer produces
small descriptions like these In this case, Mr Richardson paid $1.25 (80p) for
each picture to be described. "I had started off by sending a very low
price and it was taking about 15 minutes for a description to come back,"
he said. "I wanted to get a response much faster. I incrementally raised
the price, and I finally hit this $1.25 mark - which is about the cost of a
Polaroid print. At that price, a description would come through in about three
to six minutes." As well as using Mechanical Turk, Mr Richardson also
added a setting on the camera which would send the picture to any available
online friends to describe for free.
'What if?'
Mr
Richardson said that while there was no practical technology available to carry
out the same task, he hoped such innovations would eventually exist, giving the
camera more useful applications. "I was picturing a time in which cameras
could possibly capture more useful information that can then be searched,
cross-referenced and sorted," he said. Mr Richardson hopes that the
technology to do this without human intervention will one day exist "While
the technology isn't really here yet, I thought it would be interesting to make
a camera that would explore that 'what if?'" He said he noticed that most
people adopted an analytical tone to describe pictures rather than offer any
human emotion. "They speak very plainly about it, they're being very
subjective. They're not making any value judgements or saying something is pretty
or ugly," Mr Richardson said. "I think perhaps I could coach people
and say feel free to throw in your own opinions about it. If something's
pretty, say it's pretty."
Source:
BBC, UK
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