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AI camera with no lens
- leononame 3y agoCute 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
- anitakirkovska 3y agotheir servers are overloaded, I had to wait ~15 minutes for the page to load
- hef19898 3y agoWell, the camera already has decent long exposure capabilities.
- Solvency 3y agoIdea: 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.
- anitakirkovska 3y agohahaha that's not a bad idea at all
- radarsat1 3y agoIt's intriguing, because I wonder how this would affect police work. I'm imagining things here, but I assume that when a profile sketch is developed, all officers using that image know that it's "just a sketch" because, it looks like a drawing, because it is one. So what happens if you now generate a photorealistic "sketch" based on a description? Are officers going to be sufficiently aware to know that's not a actual photo of the guy they are looking for, and act accordingly? Or is it going to heavily bias a manhunt effort? moreover, what happens when the photo randomly ends up close to someone present in the dataset?
- lalopalota 3y agomake the system output a sketch. boom - problem solved.
- Solvency 3y agoPrints "<eye witness description of suspect> in <${art style}>" Driven by a little knob selector. Featuring 3 art styles: 1. Police sketch classic 2. Realistic photo 3. Manga character
- radarsat1 3y agoI know that would solve the problem. What I'm curious about is what happens if that isn't done, because I can see promoting the idea of a "photorealistic AI sketch artist" as a very attractive proposal for a certain type of manager. It's just a thought experiment.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoThe police already know those sketches are super fake lol. The point of those isn't to arrest the right person it's to have an excuse to hassle arrest or maybe kill a minority.
- ge96 3y agoyeah something I thought about before, all of a sudden you're the most wanted person and police just complies because that's what the system says would be crazy, probably a movie plot somewhere
- foolproofplan 3y agoi love the idea! personally, i'd cast tom cruise in it cause he's just such a great actor.
- Aromasin 3y agoI doubt it would change anything from what they do currently with police sketches; it would just be a faster, more accurate version. It's still just one piece of data they have to work from. The victim could describe the person to an AI, and it would update the 3D model on the fly. "White Male, Curly hair, mole on face" Generate. "Good, but he had a larger nose, and blue eyes." Generate. "He was a bit more gaunt, and had some stubble." Generate. "Nearly there. More pronounced check bones, and make the jaw a bit softer" Generate. In 5 minutes or less, you could get a near exact picture of the potential criminal; something that might take up to an hour or more normally with a professional police sketch artist, and it could easily be in 3D too. There's tremendous value in that.
- code_runner 3y agoI think having the feedback throughout the process would probably taint the whole thing
- themoonisachees 3y agoThis implies there is such a thing as a reliable eyewitness. Even victims themselves are famously bad at identifying criminals.
- oceanplexian 3y agoThere is probably some "wisdom in crowds" for identifying a suspect. For example one person usually can't estimate the number of gumballs in a jar, but some studies have shown that if you survey 100 people you get a very accurate number. Maybe you need far less than that.. 2-3 people + AI perhaps comes up with a reasonably accurate estimation of reality.
- itronitron 3y agoThat opens up a whole new set of job opportunities for "prompt engineering"
- discordianfish 3y agoThese ideas are what we should be worried about, not the paperclip thing.
- yyyk 3y agoHow is that idea any more concerning than a regular human-drawn police sketch?
- jkestner 3y agoLack of accountability.
- ygjb 3y agoPolice in your jurisdiction are held accountable?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yyyk 3y agoAccountability for what? I recall Procedure already requires approval of the final sketch by the witness. Witnesses could always make mistakes, but that's true even in the current process. Or is your argument sketches should never be used? In fairness, with the ubiquity of cameras, sketches are much less required...
- giraffe_lady 3y agoDidn't see the comments yesterday where HN achieved consensus that racist AI might be real but isn't that bad if it is?
- yyyk 3y agoOur hypothetical AI won't make any decisions. It just makes sketches as described and approved by witnesses. The relevant racism here is the one any witnesses may have, that's true even with a human police sketch artist.
- notjulianjaynes 3y agoAs I understand it most police departments already use some kind of computer aided facial composite software instead of a traditional sketch artist. I can think of several dystopian reasons throwing AI into the mix might not be great, but tbe larger problem with this is why does it need to be sketched in pen and why does it need to be cute. Might make a neat like coin op charicature thing though.
- mcbuilder 3y agoWell, maybe it will be a plus then for minorities that all of the training data is of white people. I only joke, as this is a horrible idea all around, but I appreciate your creativity.
- c22 3y agoWhy not use an injection molded case?
- fho 3y agoNot an expert, but my intuition is that most of the sketch artists job is asking the right questions. I would assume that most people would have trouble describing close friends or even their partners from memory. Somewhat tangential: the "part of the brain" that is responsible for recognizing faces is incredibly well developed. That "peek-a-boo" game that you play with children? Every time you uncover your face millions of neurons in the childs brain suddenly fire giving them a jolt of "joy". The face recognition is so developed that we tend to see faces were there are none (face pareidolia). ... the point being that the brain does a lot of unconscious work recognizing individuals. Describing those individuals later consciously is pretty error prone.
- belugacat 3y agoI 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-out.html https://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/descriptive-camera-prints-...)
- spython 3y agoIn 2013 a friend and I made a similar photo app (called parallelogram.me) but based on visual similarity instead of GPS coordinates: https://rybakov.com/parallelogram/ https://rybakov.com/parallelogram/
- dmd 3y agoDon't forget https://confluence.org/ https://confluence.org/
- KingOfCoders 3y ago+1 Great time, we claimed "first" on three confluence points on the site. I find hilarious pictures of me on that site :-)
- rgovostes 3y agoThe Camera Restricta from ~2014 prevents the user from taking pictures of over-photographed scenes: https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restricta.html https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restrict... Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221405
- mgdlbp 3y agoold thread, but: Sascha Pohflepp's “Buttons” (2006/2010)? Searches Flickr for same time, any location. https://web.archive.org/web/20061005142442/http://www.blinksandbuttons.net/buttons_en.html https://web.archive.org/web/20061005142442/http://www.blinks... At a hilarious intersection of the present concerns about AI, bias, and prejudice (especially as voiced in the current front-page article^1 about a different blind camera project, from 2022), and the state of internet search engines, given the query [blind camera art project], Bing and Google find only articles about visually impaired photographers, but Yandex finds an entire results page of articles about the work we're looking for! What gives? ^1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36149468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36149468
- sgok 3y agoit's like magic. incredible.
- m3kw9 3y agoEven if you bring that back to the 80s they’d think you are doing witch craft if you showed this to anyone
- mk_stjames 3y agoThis comment reminded me of some thoughts... When Stable Diffusion was released, and I saw the whole model was ~4 GB.. I instantly thought how insane it would be if it somehow was possible to take the model and a compiled binary of the inference code for x86_64 (without any modern extensions) on a DVD back in time, say around 2005-2006ish, and the implications that would have, psychologically, on the world. You could load that model on a moderate desktop with a 64 bit Core 2 Duo and 8GB of ram and let it chug .. without GPU acceleration, on CPU only it would take ~2 hours to make an image. But it would do it without an internet connection, without any inspectable code or heuristics... just... numbers, spitting out an image from text of whatever_people_want. It would be called a hoax. (In fact, I came across people on reddit when Dalle2 came out claiming it was somehow a trick or a hoax, and that all the images it produced must be existing beforehand somehow and prerendered). Scientists who dissected the weights file and the machine code for the inference engine would eventually figure out it was a neural net, but how such a net was trained would be a complete mystery. Theories involving aliens would likely appear. I wonder if it would be allowed to be made public, just the knowledge that such a thing was working. It would scare people, I think. Having it make these images without anyone knowing how. Hell, it is kinda scary now, ever knowing how it all works.
- boo-ga-ga 3y agoReally 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://danmacnish.com/2018/07/01/draw-this/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181003104348/https://danmacnis...
- teacpde 3y agosource site getting HN hug?
- amelius 3y agoI guess you can take photos of the world and turn everything into a giant NeRF. https://www.plainconcepts.com/nerf-3d/ https://www.plainconcepts.com/nerf-3d/
- dan-g 3y agoOriginal source: https://twitter.com/BjoernKarmann/status/1663496103998750721 https://twitter.com/BjoernKarmann/status/1663496103998750721
- andrevoget 3y agoThe actual source is https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/13ui4xe/celebrity_what_ifs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/13ui4xe/celebri...
- dan-g 3y agoNope, that is “Celebrity What-Ifs” on the Midjourney Reddit… The source linked from the tweet is https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/paragraphica https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/paragraphica, but it seems to be not responding.
- yieldcrv 3y agoexhibit a of how prompt engineering wont be a valued salaried skill, it is a valuable skill to create a revenue stream from
- nonethewiser 3y agoI see no reason to consider this a camera. Its just an image generator.
- capableweb 3y agoIt's a camera in the general sense of "result is a image" but not a camera in the sense of capturing physical properties of our world and convert it into bytes/pixels/analog film. I guess it's a "camera" as much as 3D software has "cameras" for controlling what the viewport is pointing towards.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> It's a camera in the general sense of "result is a image" So is the midjourney discord bot a camera? Microsoft paint? Your printer? You could say its kinda a camera because it takes pictures are your location. But it is in no way seeing anything (obviously, because there is no lense). It's just sliding some preset parameters around based on location. Again, not that its not impressive, but camera seems like the wrong word for it.
- jeffhuys 3y agoSigh. Thanks for your observation, I guess? Party-pooper! ;p
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoThink its more interesting as an art piece when we take into account the amount of AI and processing phone cameras do that crosses at times into the areas of "just an image generator"
- nonethewiser 3y agoI didn't say its not impressive, just that there is nothing about it that is a camera.
- TheDudeMan 3y agoAt first, I thought, "Cool, a sensor but no lens." Nope, no sensor.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoSame here: "Hey, let the photons hit the sensor, and the AI do the lensing". Neat if at all possible, probably not. Perhaps make a cheap lens work as a good one, with some calibration on known images?
- dist-epoch 3y agoOh dear, see through cameras are about to become a thing.
- bafe 3y agoThe 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
- dmbche 3y agoIf 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 !
- ajuc 3y agoFun exercise if you're new to photography is taking photos and cropping them to let's say 1/4th the size. You often get photos giving you a completely new perspective on things you've seen many times. For example it's easy to make a photo look like it was taken from a non-existing tower if you crop the upper part of a regular photo. Or you can focus on details that you always skip over because there's something more eye-grabbing nearby. This is also why I love to see photos made by people who visited my city for the first time. They don't know which parts are pretty so they capture stuff I wouldn't think to photograph.
- ycombinete 3y ago“giving you a completely new perspective on things you've seen many times.” This always been my idea of what makes a great photograph.
- jfengel 3y agoI am a lousy photographer. I never get that "this was the shot" feeling. I assume I could develop it with practice. I just never did. I rarely had a camera growing up, and now that I have one with me all of the time, I treat it like the Instamatics I used to have. The pictures are terrible. At best, they're a kind of bookmark that I was at that place and saw that thing. It won't have an emotional resonance for anybody but me, and for me it's just bringing up the much better picture in my head. If they want a good picture of the thing, I'll go find one that somebody else took. All of which is to say... I really admire good photographers. I respect their work, and the diligence it took to develop their eye. This is, as you note, an interesting art piece on that same subject. I'm afraid I'm better with words, so this is mine.
- manx 3y agoThere 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-picture-for-you/ https://hackaday.com/2012/04/25/a-camera-that-describes-a-pi...
- dmbche 3y agoAnd it prints the description on thermal paper, and the cost of the picture is about 1.25$ - it's so close to a polaroid! It's so cool.
- ayoreis 3y agoI thought this was going to be a more advanced version of this: https://petapixel.com/2022/05/04/newly-developed-camera-can-take-in-focus-photos-without-a-lens/ https://petapixel.com/2022/05/04/newly-developed-camera-can-...
- random3 3y agouse-case, use with AR glasses to live enhance current location
- icepat 3y agoInteresting, 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.
- peddamat 3y agoSo it's basically a Samsung.
- m463 3y agothis kind of technology is just what we need. It will always take a photo of the past, with more youthful self, hallucinated.
- PinkMilkshake 3y agoVery cool idea. I wonder if the design is a reference to the star-nosed mole. Appropriate for a blind camera!
- thecosas 3y agoCorrect! From the site https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/paragraphica https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/paragraphica “ The star-nosed mole, which lives and hunts underground, finds light useless. Consequently, it has evolved to perceive the world through its finger-like antennae, granting it an unusual and intelligent way of "seeing." This amazing animal became the perfect metaphor and inspiration for how empathizing with other intelligences and the way they perceive the world can be nearly impossible to imagine from a human perspective.”
- yowzadave 3y agoUnfortunately 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.
- vngzs 3y agoThis 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 https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/paragraphica The author's site is currently struggling to load, so here is an archive link: https://archive.is/mvfq2 https://archive.is/mvfq2