Ubi-Camera: Take Photos With Your Hands [WTF]

From Akihabara News:

The Ubi-Camera takes photos composed by framing them with your hands. This prototype miniature camera is being developed by a research group at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences.

“When you draw a picture or take a photo, you sometimes form a rectangle with your hands to decide the composition. With this camera, you can take a photo using the exact same motion. You attach this device to your index finger, and form a rectangle with your finger like this. You take the photo by using the rectangle as the viewfinder, like this. When you push hard with your thumb, the shutter is pressed.”

The camera contains a range sensor, and the framing is determined by the distance between the camera and the photographers face. With the current system, which is still in development, the lens has a fixed focal length, and zooming is done digitally on a PC.

“When you take a photo with your face close to the camera, you get a wide-angle shot like this, and if you move it further away, you can take a close up shot.”

With this method of photography, viewfinders and displays are unnecessary. So even with a miniature camera, you can take photos intuitively, while looking at the actual scene.

“Here, the camera has a wired connection to a PC, but we’d like to make a stand-alone camera that can be freely used outside. Also, the range sensor currently uses infrared, so it sometimes doesn’t detect your face properly, or it can be affected by light from the surroundings. So we’d like to use the camera to measure the distance as well, through face recognition. That would enable the system to be used more precisely.”

And here in action:

(source: Akihabara News)