Instant Cartoon Camera

An engineer and visual artist, Dan Macnish, from Melbourne, Australia has created an instant cartoon camera, ‘Draw This’. This camera takes picture and print out cartoon instead of normal photo. He was inspired by Polaroid instant camera and created this camera. This camera utilizes Google’s ‘Quick, Draw!’ dataset to draw cartoonish line drawings.

(Instant cartoon camera. Photo Courtesy: Dan Macnish)

The ‘Quick, Draw!’ is a neural network generated by Google. The Google requested people to submit drawings which were recognized and learned by its neural network. More than 15 million players contributed 50 million drawings. Macnish’s instant camera uses this data and print out line drawings. This camera has a Raspberry Pi, a single-board computer, to process photo and the neural network data. The cartoon photo will be printed out using a thermal printer in the camera. 

(Instant cartoon camera. Photo Courtesy: Dan Macnish)

Macnish has made the camera with cardboard box. The cartoon print outs look interesting and funny. You can make this camera by yourself. Macnish has shared sufficient information about how to make this camera on GitHub website. You will need Raspberry Pi, python programming language, raspi camera and thermal printer to make this camera. 

(Instant cartoon camera. Photo Courtesy: Dan Macnish)