Have you ever felt the urge to touch a lens like a button or a joystick? I built some soft silicone blobs that can transform camera lenses into physical input elements.

I tried to squeeze a paper into the shape of a YouTube video: https://youtu.be/lyz52IzMcnM

So, Shaper has a new product and it's a plastic computer vision marker frame to digitalize hand-drawn lines with a photo in a web app:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shaper/shaper-trace-go-from-sketch-to-vector-in-seconds

The marker pattern looks very much like Pi-Tag by Bergamasco et al. but I guess they don't rely need all the fancy tricks of that paper.

I generally very much like what they do (and they are one of the few succcessful companies that emerged from the field of human-computer interaction). But the pricing is a bit weird on this one.

A while ago I stumbled upon the fact that cameras can reverse the perspective of an image. The only thing you need for that is a lens larger than whatever you want to take a photo of.

Because I enjoy taking the most horrible photos of faces I can I set out to find the largest lens I could get.

If you're curious how that looks, there is a YouTube video: https://youtu.be/d0Njtko93RQ

In case you went to a wedding recently (or you are old, sorry), you may know disposable cameras. ~27 pictures on film and a lot of plastic waste.
I wondered if it's possible to make something useful with them instead of throwing them away. The answer is: kind of.

Re/Upcycling disposable cameras for toy lenses:

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnvB71b50wY

Blog post: https://volzo.de/thing/recyclinglenses/

Public Service Announcement: if you’re doing spring cleaning, clean your laptop as well…

On the positive side: nothing in these heaps of dust was alive given the fact that this MacBook easily reached a 100 degrees.