What if in the future your camera didn’t need to … well be a camera? Pushing the eerie “big brother” thoughts aside, this project is an ingenious use of AI.

The ‘camera’ creates an image using AI. It pulls data from parameters such as weather, GPS location, date, time of day etc

Dubbed the Paragraphica, creator Bjørn Karmann modeled the design after the star-nosed mole rat. Fittingly the animal is notorious for being ‘blind’ but actually perceives the world through other means.

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The device looks somewhat like a classic camera. It has a huge cover over where a lens would be that resembles the nose of a star-nosed mole. The viewfinder is a screen in which you can adjust the settings for the generation of your picture. It also has a series of dials that can be adjusted to set things like film grain and sharpness for the AI program to integrate into the photo generation process. Pressing the capture button will trigger the system to generate a photograph for you based on the selected parameters.

Data used in the image generation is gathered using various open APIs. This includes things like your location, date, time, as well as nearby landmarks. Paragraphica uses all of this information to process the final photo using text-to-image AI.

Learn more about the Paragraphica from bjoernkarmann.dk

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