This shooter's no quack

by Leonard Goh | 3 July 2008 3:17pm SGT

Besides kimchi and tear-jerking dramas, Koreans are exporting creatively hacked cameras, too. While on vacation, Taeyoon Choi had a flash of brilliance when he saw that his shots looked no different from the other tourists'. With some tinkering, he fitted a point-and-shoot into the Magical Image Digesting Duck named Charlie.

Like any good inventions, there is more to Charlie than meets the eye. Hooked up to the shooter is a vacuum cleaner, printer and MP3 player. All the devices are linked to a central controller which handles the automated operations of the duck.

Charlie follows Choi around New York and, whenever someone takes a photo of it, it senses the flash and automatically snaps a picture of the person. The mechanical bird then prints out the

picture (which comes out from its rear end) or posts it online when a wireless hotspot is available.

Choi's rationale for building this was that he wanted to "liberate cameras from human operation". With face detection and all the other smart functions that shooters ship with these days, it's only a matter of time before they communicate with Skynet and try to take over our lives.

Picture credit: Camerautomata

This shooter's no quack

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