A Camera That Prints Text Descriptions Instead of Photos?

Matt Richardson created a very unique camera that manages to be both technologically sophisticated, yet lo-fi enough to make pinhole cameras seem advanced. When a picture is taken with this camera you actually don’t get a picture at all…the camera prints out a description of the picture instead. Confused? Stay with me for a second and I’ll explain.  

After the shutter button has been pressed, the Descriptive Camera sends the digital photo to Amazon Mechanical Turk for “processing”. Somewhere in the world, someone receives this photo and then writes a short description of what’s in the photo in exchange for a small payment. They then send the description back to the Descriptive Camera, which prints the text out in a style that resembles a Polaroid print.

This may be one of the most useless cameras ever, but on the other hand, it’s one of the coolest cameras ever.

[Via Today and Tomorrow]