Website Turns Traffic Cameras Into Photobooths on the Street
A new website lets New Yorkers use the Department of Transportation traffic camera network to capture unusual selfies on the streets.
The website TrafficCamPhotobooth.com was made by Brooklyn resident Morry Kolman and provides access to the more than 900 city traffic cameras that the Department of Transportation streams in (almost) real-time on its own website.
Users must open the Traffic Cam Photobooth website on their smartphone and provide location data to automatically access the nearest traffic camera or select a camera from the heavily populated map on the website.
People can then use the traffic camera like a photo booth by posing for three seconds and tapping on the screen. The webpage will then show the most recent image from the traffic camera, which takes a few seconds to update.
“What I like about this project specifically is that people love to be given something, especially something about themselves,” Kolman tells New York Post.
Kolman adds that the project is an interesting way to let people have fun, take selfies, and become more aware of New York City’s vast surveillance system. A study earlier this year by Comparitech found that New York City has nearly 71,000 surveillance cameras in total, the most of any city in the United States but still far behind many Asian cities on a camera per person basis.
The creator has some essential tips for those in New York City who want to capture a very unusual selfie using Kolman’s new website. The most important thing is to avoid standing in the middle of the street and to look both ways before crossing. Beyond that, Kolman recommends wearing bright clothing or posing with a large group to make an impression in the traffic camera’s wide-angle field of view.
The website was the result of Kolman taking an art class that had students consider how to take pictures without actively pressing a camera’s shutter. The Traffic Cam Photobooth checks that box and is one of the most unusual “cameras” out there.
“I guess this [website] is one of my many contributions to places that are interesting online that do things that are just independent, free, interesting and have some effect in the world, hopefully,” Kolman tells The Post.
Kolman has received requests to expand the project to other cities and is currently looking at Atlanta and Salt Lake City as potential candidates. Kolman is using GitHub as a repository for the project and associated data, and anyone is free to build upon his work to create something similar in other places.
Image credits: Screenshots from TrafficCamPhotobooth.com. Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
