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Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

mattrichardson.com

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Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#71

Post by hammock »

anjc wrote: post #65
hammock wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already exists- remember Google Goggles? Except in this implementation it's a little more hipster/artsy since it prints it out for you on receipt paper. Honestly, as a camera, it is a step backwards. Photographs efficiently capture many times more information than a simple text description. However, what it is a good demonstration of is the growing cognitive abilities of image-reading machines.

It's not trying to be more hipster by printing descriptions, the pictures are described via Mechanical Turk (from humans), this is why it's interesting.

Ah, well fuck me for not reading the writeup more thoroughly.

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#72

Post by pavel_lishin »

edw519 wrote: post #29

----------------------------------- | | | | | | This is a picture of | | | | 30-60% off top brand name | | | | shoes like Nike, Vans, | | | | Adidas, Toms, and more. | | | | Call 1-800-TURK-GAMER to | | | | find your perfect pair. | | | | | | | ------------------------------- | | | | | -----------------------------------

Could be helped by adding a secondary task, asking Turkers whether the description matches the photograph.

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#73

Post by pavel_lishin »

scraplab wrote: post #4

This is brilliant. It reminds me of Sascha Pohflepp's Blinks & Buttons project, which swaps your photo with someone else's taken at the same time. There's even an iPhone app. http://www.blinksandbuttons.net/

Reminds me of Swapshot.

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#74

Post by anjc »

hammock wrote: post #71
anjc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not trying to be more hipster by printing descriptions, the pictures are described via Mechanical Turk (from humans), this is why it's interesting.

Ah, well fuck me for not reading the writeup more thoroughly.

You were right that it is artsy though...

(And in your defense, having humans manually describe images in the image recognition domain seems so...unmodern, that your assumption was probably fair)

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#75

Post by mbesto »

ghshephard wrote: post #6
mbesto wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical analysis I don't think I would rely on a description from a Mechanical Turk human for describing what they see in a pictue. Is that a tibia or a fibula?!?

Right - you don't send to Mechanical Turk. You instead send it to a highly trained backend workforce, presumably highly skilled in the vertical that you are doing analysis on. And, it's not just a picture, but video/sound/other sensing. Who knows what the next advances in remote telemetry will be.

So why is this "technology" ground-breaking then? I thought the point of this is that it that you 1. take picture 2. send over the internets 3. wait 3~6min to get a response on what the picture is about.

Try scaling this out..."highly-trained" means poor scalability and lots of liability.

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#76

Post by mbesto »

JunkDNA wrote: post #38
mbesto wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical analysis I don't think I would rely on a description from a Mechanical Turk human for describing what they see in a pictue. Is that a tibia or a fibula?!?

Lots of US hospitals already use offshore radiology services who interpret various medical imaging tests taken in the overnight hours an report back the findings.

Citation? (note - not trying to be snarky...moreso curious)

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#77

Post by tlrobinson »

My first thought was "oh great, another silly art project", but I've been wanting something like the Mechanical Turk part of it for awhile.

My least favorite part of photography is organizing and finding the best photos. I'd happily pay to have a bunch of people rate all my photos (if the results are meaningful enough)

You'd probably need to show each photo to multiple Turkers to get good data. You could run analysis on the votes to kick out the Turkers who give ratings that deviate significantly from other Turkers. Does MTurk have anything like that built in?

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#78

Post by Tloewald »

mbesto wrote: post #76
JunkDNA wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of US hospitals already use offshore radiology services who interpret various medical imaging tests taken in the overnight hours an report back the findings.

Citation? (note - not trying to be snarky...moreso curious)

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2005/06/29/radiology...

Article from 2005.

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#79

Post by ghshephard »

mbesto wrote: post #75
ghshephard wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - you don't send to Mechanical Turk. You instead send it to a highly trained backend workforce, presumably highly skilled in the vertical that you are doing analysis on. And, it's not just a picture, but video/sound/other sensing. Who knows what the next advances in remote telemetry will be.

So why is this "technology" ground-breaking then? I thought the point of this is that it that you 1. take picture 2. send over the internets 3. wait 3~6min to get a response on what the picture is about. Try scaling this out..."highly-trained" means poor scalability and lots of liability.

The technology isn't ground breaking - it's the combination of five or six technologies that are maturing at the same time that make this sort of application (real time human assessment of remote telemetry) work.

Re: Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image

#80

Post by Volscio »

huskyr wrote: post #22
drostie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I? Would the point somehow be served if you took a self-portrait and the response back was "haha ur so ugly"...? (I should add that I know that Amazon offers a review process, but I am not sure how it integrates with the above camera, and I am thus assuming that the camera automatically has to accept a description as correct before printing it out. This might not be the case; and I don't know.)

You are. This isn't ment to be a completely realistic project ready to be shipped, it's a glimpse of the future, or maybe an art project. I think it's wonderful to see out-of-the-box stuff like this appearing on Hacker News.

Yep, Matt Richardson (my classmate at NYU/ITP, but I wasn't in the course he made this for) makes some pretty cool stuff: http://mattrichardson.com/tech/ He made a project for physical computing class that took hashtagged tweets and displayed them via laser onto phosphorescent vinyl, which caused them to fade away over time.

He's also a writer for Make: http://blog.makezine.com/author/makemattr/

I think the key is that he's one of those people who are experimenting with mashing up not only different technologies but also different generations of technologies.

I guess one could call this stuff "parlor tricks" as one other person said but I agree that it's totally within the spirit of hackernews.

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