This camera has no lens but uses AI to click pictures – Times of India

Who would have thought AI would replace cameras and not the phones? After writers, musicians, and designers, AI is coming for photographers or, essentially, cameras. There is a new AI camera in the town, which looks and feels very much like how a camera does but obliterates one thing that makes a camera a camera, the lens.
We are familiar with how a camera functions, right? Light enters the camera through the lens and strikes the sensor or a film frame, if it is a film camera. But what if there is no lens in a camera? Well, that is Paragraphica for you.
Called the Paragraphica, this AI camera resembles a regular camera but with a TV aerial in place of the lens. This camera uses the hot new ‘generative AI’ to capture pictures based on geolocation, time, and weather without requiring any input from the user.
The so-called camera’s viewfinder shows your current location in real-time, and when you press the trigger, it produces a scintigraphic image based on that location. What is scintigraphy? This process is used to create pictures (scans) of internal body structures, and here it does the same, but for the description, the user has given.
Paragaphica uses a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B on the hardware side to create the prompt and receive the generated photo. The photo is then displayed on a touchscreen LCD, which is fitted inside a 3D-printed enclosure. All the components are housed inside an enclosure having a vintage design reminiscent of the Leica cameras.
Like a traditional camera, the camera also has three physical dials to adjust the data and AI parameters. The first dial adjusts the scan radius, while the second creates a noise seed. The third dial controls the guidance scale, affecting focus.
This is how “Paragraphica,” the AI camera, works
Paragraphica has a GPS module that finds your current location and uses the Open Weather API to determine the local weather conditions. It also uses the API to find information about nearby geographical features.
Like a traditional camera, this one also has physical dials, three of them. One can adjust the radius of the search, the noise seed for Stable Diffusion, and how closely Stable Diffusion follows the prompt using the three dials.
The result is an original AI-generated photo reflecting the reality around you. Still, they look uncannily, so the pictures do not exactly look like the photos you would click from a mirrorless camera or phone.
The Paragraphica seems to be one of its own, which is with its creator Bjørn Karmann. But, if you want to see how the camera works for yourself, then Karmann has also built a virtual camera that you can try.