The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype uses crowd sourcing to output a text description of the scene.

As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they're doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don't yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera uses crowd sourcing to explore these possibilities.

The assignment was for a class called Computational Cameras, which explores camera technology through experimentation and research. The final assignment was open ended, a chance to further explore any of the topic areas we covered. I decided to go off on my own and create something completely new for the final. I wanted to explore what human workers can do online and how that can be brought into the physical world.

I researched other uses of human workers behind computational tasks and experimented with the capabilities of the new hardware platforms that I was using.

The project is meant to get people to discuss new ways of looking at photography and thinking about its relationship with data. It's also meant to be bring an unexpected dash of humanity in a cold technological world.