It's a very interesting project regardless, but the idea that all the angles and lights have been captured of even famous monuments is entirely wrong. That's precisely why photography is interesting and why we do it - each moment is visually unique and will never be repeated. It's worth being aware of if you spend your time designing systems for automation (i.e. software development)
You're absolutely right, but tourists pointing their phones up at the Eiffel Tower aren't paying attention to the angle, light, or anything else. They're just mindlessly snapping a picture of the Famous Thing. You know you're not dealing with photographers when you see them using their flashes to photograph a distant mountain range, or fireworks.
Maybe they'll send it out in a text message to show where they are. It's just a kind of ritual behavior. The purpose is not to acquire a photograph of Famous Thing, because, as this invention reminds us, there are already photographs available. It's a bit more functional when your friends' heads are arrayed in front of the Famous Thing. The next iteration of this device should be able to superimpose the faces of your travelling companions.
Yeah, fuck tourists. And their wanting to photograph and share the interesting things they see on their travels without having any advanced training in photography. The gall!
For me, this bypasses the emotional aspects of taking a photo. When I take a photo of the Eiffel tower, I am capturing the moment of when I visit the Eiffel tower with my family. In the future, when I look at the that Eiffel tower photo, I will re-create the feeling of _when_ the photo is taking as it serves a reminder.
Without trying it's hard to know, but it's actually possible that this gadget would be more emotionally engaging. When you take a picture, even just a snap without bothering to frame it or get settings right, you're detached from the moment - you're physically and emotionally engaged with the device rather than the environment.
With a gadget that could automatically gather a set of photos from the internet that matched the location, time of day, weather, direction, etc that you were experiencing at the time you could, theoretically, go for a walk around a city without having to interact with anything other than the people you're with, being completely in the moment and engaged with them the whole way, and still have a pictorial journal of the trip.
It wouldn't be impossible to automatically superimpose pictures of you and your friends in the images, correctly matching perspective and lighting.
Whether or not that would actually cause the memory to be stronger or not is hard to say without testing it, but most memories are remembered wholly incorrectly anyway so that might not matter.
You made me think of a different sort of device that could be pretty cool.
First, you'd need to come up with some way to automatically judge whether a picture is "good" or "interesting" with some sort of reliability. That's probably hard, but maybe doable now. If possible, take a large picture and crop it down to something interesting.
Then, just leave a camera running continuously. Put it on your hat or hang it from your neck or something. Automatically save all the "interesting" shots. Then you have your pictures, but have been able to pay attention to what's going on around you rather than to the camera.
That would be interesting. I think it's what the likes of Narrative are trying to do with the Clip device, but they just take a shot at regular intervals rather than trying to be clever about working out what's good algorithmically.
It probably wouldn't be that hard to do based on motion rather than vision if you can make a few assumptions, like 'people still relatively still to look at interesting things' and 'when people are facing each other they want to remember that scene'.
Carrying that thought further, you would basically need a high-resolution 3D video recording of our entire planet, captured by a network of nano bots. Then a maybe 13-dimensional vector (position, direction, up direction, time, focal length, aspect ratio, Instagram effect...) would suffice to describe any photo.
> Why are you taking this picture? It’s already on the Internet!
I am taking it, so that I can use it whenever and wherever I want, without being afraid of "copyright" holders. Not ideal, but hey, such is life these days.
"These days"? You mean these days, when we have instant access to millions of Eiffel tower photos through a device not larger than a pocket mirror, yet life is a suffocating grind because some of those images are not licensed for redistribution.
Copyright is the quintessential first-world problem, I guess.
Exactly. "These days" you have 1 million photos of Eiffel tower, most look the same, bit blurry, not ideal lighting, etc. Yet you cannot really use them, unless you pay someone some amount of money, or you write an essay attributing them (and you spend 2 days figuring out what the license actually is for that piece of "art"). Say you want to make a t-shirt with a picture of Eiffel tower, with some catchy meme underneath, and sell it. You google/bing/whatnot for "picture of Eiffel tower", download the best looking image and silk print a t-shirt. Now, in an unlikely event it catches up, and you start selling in millions, what's going to happen? There's a good chance that you'll get a mail from someone who took that crappy picture and now demands a hefty sum in royalties. Well, just to avoid that, I take the picture. I don't care that there are millions of those taken already, they are not "mine". Yes, first-world problems, but they might be quire pricey. /rantover
Don't think so. The very first image has "Some rights reserved". If you click on that, it says "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use." I don't want to do that. Or even if I wanted, I don't want to spend time figuring out what exactly each clause in the license means. F* that, I'll just take the damn picture myself.
You think that adding a small tag that tays, "Picture by X, license is http://whatever" is some high burden? You've transcended first-world problems and started in on the negative numbers.
I'd like to see this take off in museums, in order to prevent the incessant strobe lighting caused by people using flash photography to take a poorly-lit photo of a painting for which there exists a magnificent, professionally-photographed reproduction in the gift shop.
Yes, most museums ban flash photography (and there's some debate over whether flash photography will actually damage a painting). But go visit the (US) National Gallery some time and stand in front of Titian's "Feast of the Gods" or Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci (the only Leonardo portrait in North America). You'll see one flash after another, even though (in the latter case) there's a sign asking people not to. I've even seen, at another museum, a block cut of Munch's "The Scream" that had a cloth cover over it (that you could lift) to protect the work from light. No problem. People just lifted up the cloth and snapped a flash photo.
As for the rest of the paintings at the NG: Well, people can just go crazy. It's like visiting Harold Edgerton's laboratory.
I was so floored by this last time I visited, I asked the people at the desk about it. They told me that with few exceptions, you can flash away at anything you like as long as you're not using a tripod. You're free, in other words, to give your fellow museum goers a seizure; you just can't make money at it.
Suggested next version: camera/app which determines whether other people nearby are photographic/recording the same thing, and tells you to just enjoy the view/show while obtaining a copy of theirs.
Think of how many children's group performances/event involve 2/3rds of parents present fiddling with their cameras rather than just watching.
I go through airport security all the time with all sorts of rPI's and Arduino's often wired to buttons and IMU's and various SDR Radio's.. Every time I put them in my bag I think "this is the one that's going to get me stopped". Not even a sideways glance from the scanning operators.
I often go through with things in static protection bags, sometimes big bundles of LED strings and again nobody stops me.
I'm not sure if I'm happy because I don't have to explain the things in my bag or worried that they're looking for stuff so specific that someone with 1/2 a brain could build something that would get though easily...
I don't think airport security is interested in a bunch of wires, pcb's and buttons as long as there aren't any explosives attached to it. The idea of the scanner is to see the explosives, not the detonator (you could use about anything with a battery for that).
Selfie's aside, I constantly coach my family members -- don't take a photo without someone (that you know/have just met) in it. This is why you take a photo of the Eiffel Tower: because Jane and Jack are there with you.
Is there a Google-like indexer that indexes all the photos it can find online and makes them searchable on location information in the EXIF data? That would be a killer backend for something like this. Seems like something Google Images could easily do but I can't find an option for it.
I think that's what the project is using. But I also thought Panoramio required people submit photos to it, it doesn't just pick up every photo it can find online (like Google Images does). I've never uploaded anything to Panoramio but I've taken a ton of pictures.
I don't understand how it works. Does it only use the GPS to find photos from around your spot, or does it use some sort of camera to find something that matches what you take? I imagine the former, since I didn't see anything that could sense light in there.
(Haven't looked through the code) I think the idea is that you press the button, it gets the current GPS coordinate, searches the internet and gives you a virtual photo of what's around you, given the photos it found taken nearby. Then it's shown on the screen taped to it. So it's like a camera without the lens, you press the button and get the picture.
Right, that's what it looks like, thanks. From the description, I thought it would also know which way you're looking, and maybe the conditions (time of day, weather, etc). Something that took a low-res photo and matched it with a higher res/better-taken photo would be pretty interesting.
I'm taking the picture because it makes it my picture, bad lighting, poor weather, bad composition and all. Years later those photos can stimulate pleasant memories of that time I was wherever that photo was taken.
Part of the value of photos are about attachment to a time and a place and as a tool to the photographer to remind them of that time. This mitigates that.
You're out sightseeing without a camera. As soon as you're back in your hotel room you plot out the route you went on a map and get a photo album back.
Uh...yeah. What he said. I think that's what you really wanted to make.
What you show, on the other hand, is a product that would be best used by people who never want to leave their hotel, but just plot out their sightseeing route on a map and view all the great pictures of the experience they never had.
It looks like a camera but, instead of taking a picture, figures out the location with GPS and downloads and displays an already existing picture from the Internet.
Wow, this thread is a shit show. Ha ha. Personally I'm more offended by the use of a solderless breadboard in a "real project" in the field. Solder up a stripboard, ya weenie! Maybe get around to having a logo designed after that.
This is awesome! Finally someone made this! I wanted to make it for a long time and to start taking it with me everywhere.
Why are you taking this picture? It’s already on the Internet! - this is my thought every time I see a tourist taking photo of some random thing that has been photographed by millions of others before him. Sometimes, when I'm in a bad mood, I say "It's already on Flickr!" out loud when passing by said tourist.
> Sometimes, when I'm in a bad mood, I say "It's already on Flickr!" out loud when passing by said tourist.
When they shout back, "That's true, but this is a record of my personal experience here and I can use this particular photo as an aid to help me remember the feel of the weather, the color of the leaves, the details of this particular moment, from my particular vantage point -- and that's what's important, not just the fact that a million photos have been taken here before me -- this is my photo" do you stick around to listen, or do you just continue walking in a self-congratulatory huff?
I happen to be born without the gene that gives you the ability to derive emotional experiences from photos you made. Probably because of that, I don't enjoy "tourism" at all. No, I don't even grok it.
Oh, that's okay then. When someone's enjoying themselves in a way that confuses you but otherwise has nothing to do with you, it's perfectly acceptable to be an asshole to them. Carry on, good sir! Keep making the world a better place!
