Descriptive Camera develops text instead of images
Picture tells a thousand words
A camera for the blind sounds almost as pointless as a comb for baldies or a pedal-powered wheelchair, yet with the Descriptive Camera - a snapper that chronicles an image in text - the possibility seems less absurd.
New York University graduate Matt Richardson had a flash of genius and decided a picture should indeed tell a thousand words - quite literally.
When an image has been taken it is uploaded to Amazon's Mechanical Turk site, which dishes out small tasks to desperate web-dwellers in return for a wee fee.
A description of the image is then sent back to the camera where it is printed out in text. Unfortunately, this is hardly instant, with an average time of 3-6 minutes for a single photograph. Each snap generally costs around 80p to translate too.
The designer did throw in the option of sending the picture to available online friends for a free description instead, though.
Of course, all of this would need to be vocalised somehow to turn it into a camera for the visually impaired, but if the text data is there, it shouldn't be too hard to feed it to a speech synth.
For further details, check out Matt Richardson's Descriptive Camera website. ®
COMMENTS
3-6mins = not great for taking on safari
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It is a Bengal tiger. It is
looking at you and is running
towards you with its jaws
wide open.
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Is that normal?
What? Taking a double Polaroid of it and showing it to your mates? No!
What do you want to do now?
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
Open to abuse
"The designer did throw in the option of sending the picture to available online friends for a free description instead, though."
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This is a picture of...wait, what is that? It looks kind
of like a shrivelled frankfurter sausage and two
scotch eggs covered in hair?....oh, no wait, it can't be
... oh sweet lord! Gross, Dave, seriously gross
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"this would need to be vocalised somehow"
Anyone else thinking of the Tommorrows World sketch on Not the Nine O'Clock news and the device to let deaf people know when their telephone is ringing!
