This Camera Gives You a Receipt Instead of Your Photos

A novel camera design denies the photographer their pictures for months on end, instead printing out a receipt describing what’s in the photo.

The Memogram, created by student Jamy Herrmann, prints out a ticket, rather than a photo, listing the subjects in the picture and informs the photographer when they will be able to actually see their photo.

The unique camera also acts like a disposable film camera in that the user can take a maximum of 36 images, forcing the shooter to think carefully when before pressing the shutter.

Memogram camera
The Memogram

The receipt is created after the photo has been uploaded to a web service where it is sent through a series of checks and neural network APIs to detect the objects in the image.

As noted by Hackster, the artificial intelligence (AI) system will detect a person’s age, gender, and even their emotional state. For group shots, the people are merely counted up, and for a photo with no people — the AI determines the subject of the photo and gives a text description.

Camera Design

The Memogram utilizes the most ubiquitous camera of all, a smartphone. The phone is placed into a paper case resembling a disposable camera after which the shooter navigates to the Memograp app and presses a physical shutter button to take a photo.

Once the photo is captured, it is uploaded to the web service — but instead of seeing the photo right away, the photographer gets the ticket instead.

Memogram camera

The physical receipt comes from a thermal printer that communicates with the phone via Bluetooth using an Arduino Pro Mini 5V board mounted to a custom printed circuit board (PCB). An Adafruit Bluefruit LE UART Friend handles the Bluetooth communication aspect.

The Receipt

The receipt includes a description of what is in the photo along with things like the time and location which add up to the total amount of days the photographer has to wait to see their photo. Hackster reports that it can be anything from 20 to 90 days.

Receipt

Once the time has elapsed, the photographer can view their photo on the web app by entering the password that is also printed out on the receipt.

The project’s website can be viewed here.


Image credits: All photos courtesy of Jamy Herrmann.

Discussion