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Ubi-Camera

How many times have you tried to see how the picture is going to look like, using your fingers to make a rectangle?

The institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in japan has made a prototype camera that uses this approach to take pictures. They made a prototype camera which is still in development that has no viewfinder and no display screen; instead it uses the rectangle that you will make with your fingers to frame the picture. It also doesn’t have any zoom buttons and uses the distance between the operator and the camera to zoom in or out. If the distance between the operator and the camera is small or it is in front of the operators face it makes a wide angle pictures and if it is far away from the operators face it zooms in on the subject. In the prototype it coordinates with the users face distance via infrared beam, but because this technology is not that good (it can be affected by light and other sources) they are planning of detecting the users face with face recognition software.

The camera has a lens that is fixed and you need to use the computer to zoom in or out. So far the camera is connected by a cable to the computer that shows the captured images instantly but they want to make this a wireless process and make the camera standalone hardware.

Even though this is not as good as the Lytro camera that we have reviewed before it will be a good way of introducing basic photography to the younger generation. The product is still in the development phase so there is still no determined price, but this should be a cheap replacement camera, using it instead of the cheap one usage cameras.