Memogram Captures and Prints Pictures Using Only Words
As an effort to get people to use their memory and live in the moment, this project replaces photo printouts with a text description.
The concept
Human memory is an amazing thing, as we can recall people, locations, and events from many decades ago. However, the advent of the digital camera has meant the collective offloading of this task from our own brains onto digital storage. And while this is advantageous capturing the exact details about something, it also leaves us with a less solid internal picture of what occurred. The Memogram project, created by student Jamy Herrmann at the Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL), aims to partially reverse this trend by forcing the user to remember the images they captured through only small text descriptions until a couple of months have elapsed.
Capturing images
The basis for any camera system is the camera itself, of course, and rather than coming up with a complex, custom solution, Herrmann decided to use the cameras we all already carry with us- our smartphones. After placing the phone into the paper case molded into the form of a disposable camera, the user navigates to the Memogram web app and presses the physical shutter button to snap a photo. From here, the data is uploaded to the service and stored, although it is not available for immediate access yet.
How to convert a photo into text
As previously outlined, Memogram prompts users to recall their images by only reading short descriptions for a period of up to several months before they can view the original photo. Once the web service has received the uploaded image, it is sent through a series of checks and neural network APIs to detect which entities are found in the scene. For a single person, the engine deduces the subject's age, gender, and other information about their emotional state. Bigger groups are merely counted, and a photo with no people at all is sent through several MobileNet models before ultimately arriving at the text description.
Building the hardware
Turning the resulting text into a physical receipt is handled by a thermal printer that communicates with the phone via Bluetooth. An Arduino Pro Mini 5V board was mounted to a custom PCB along with an Adafruit Bluefruit LE UART Friend that actually handles the BLE communication aspect. When the phone is ready to print the receipt, it sends information including the time, location, description, a list of factors for determining the waiting period, and the password so that the image can be accessed later to the Pro Mini. The board, in turn, commands the thermal printer to output the information in a pleasant layout. Everything is housed within a self-contained unit and is powered by a single 9V battery.
Bringing back memories
Once the requisite number of days have passed, whether it is a mere 20 or all the way up to 90, the user is finally able to view their original photo online through the web app by entering the password listed on the printout. Finally, Memogram acts like a disposable film camera in that a maximum of 36 images may be taken, meaning the user must be careful and thoughtful about what they choose to photograph. More information about Memogram can be found here on the project's website.