> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.protein.xyz/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Descriptive Camera
- URL: https://www.protein.xyz/the-descriptive-camera/
- Published: 2012-05-01T11:02:46.000Z
- Updated: 2025-05-28T11:02:37.000Z
- Description: Most cameras these days are pretty complicated with settings for just about anything you can think of.
- Author: Protein
- Tags: Seeds, Technology, #protein, #Import 2024-06-11 13:15, #author-change-2025-05-28

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/71/fc716215-5729-441a-bd07-e2b50bc413b1/content/images/S3/protein/4066/6814d1f8-f920-4815-884a-71246ad4a272.jpeg)

Most cameras these days are pretty complicated with settings for just about anything you can think of. The Descriptive Camera, on the other hand, is pretty simple: point the camera, press the shutter and an image comes out like a Polaroid. This camera, however, instantly produces an image that is a text description of the content — no photo at all.

The camera consists of a USB webcam, a shutter button, a small printer and an Ethernet connection. Once the user 'takes a photo', the image is transmitted via the Ethernet cable to [Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API](https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome?ref=protein.xyz), where workers completing 'human intelligence tasks' (HITs) take a look at the image and then describe what they see. Once a description has been assigned to the image (through a combination of HIT responses), the thermal printer on the camera prints out the text.

Take a photo of a cupboard for example — the text description comes out with, 'looks like a cupboard which is ugly and old having name plates on it with a study lamp attached to it'. A photo of a building, meanwhile, yields, 'this is a faded picture of a dilapidated building. It seems to be run down and in need of repairs.'

The project was created by [Matt Richardson](http://mattrichardson.com/?ref=protein.xyz) as part of New York University's Telecommunications course with the hope that one day it could be used for managing photography collections. He explains, ' I was picturing a time in which cameras could possibly capture more useful information that can then be searched, cross-referenced and sorted.'

Check it out [here](http://mattrichardson.com/Descriptive-Camera/?ref=protein.xyz).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/71/fc716215-5729-441a-bd07-e2b50bc413b1/content/images/S3/protein/4066/b3547402-ea16-4fb0-8eee-41ce464db5db.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/71/fc716215-5729-441a-bd07-e2b50bc413b1/content/images/S3/protein/4066/d1370a5b-2575-4f2a-9474-49e92c43d03b.jpeg)