The Camera That Doesn’t Take Photos — It Finds Them

What happened

Digital cameras generally do pretty much what you'd expect: capture an image and store it for later viewing. Strange Inventions demonstrates the concept using an extremely low-resolution 3×3 monochrome image.

This Raspberry Pi camera doesn't save photos — it calculates where they exist in a theoretical library of every possible image. Strange Inventions built one that works very differently.

His Image Locator Camera is based on the idea that every possible digital photograph already exists mathematically, so instead of saving a new image, it tells you where to find that image in a theoretical library containing every possible picture. This works because a digital image is ultimately just a collection of pixels, and there are only a finite number of ways those pixels can be arranged.