Frame The Shot With Your Fingers Using by Ubi-Cam

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You might look pretty dorky these days if you make a frame from your fingers and start sizing up the world around you. But it’s actually a surprisingly good way to separate out parts of the landscape, especially for artists using pencils or paint who may not be carrying a camera.

But what about combining the two? That’s just what the nerds have done down at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Japan. The Ubi-Camera is a tiny digicam which uses your fingers as the viewfinder, and even allows you to zoom.

The Ubi-Camera comes with an infrared range finder that uses your face to determine the angle of the photo. When your face is close to the camera, you get a wide-angle shot; move them away, and the camera zooms in for a close-up of your subject. Press a button with your thumb to take the picture.

The lens has a fixed focal length, so you would have to zoom in or out on a computer. Unfortunately it’s not quite as advanced as the Lytro light-field camera, but still pretty neat for a gadget that fits over your index finger.

With this type of camera, you wouldn’t need a viewfinder or a display screen at all — what you see through your fingers is a pretty close approximation of what you’ll see in the photograph. The prototype, developed at the Institute for Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Japan, is connected via wires to a computer, but its developers want to build a free-standing model you could use outside. From there, it’s not a far leap to imagine this as an even smaller wireless device. Maybe you could wear it like a ring, and go around drawing little hand-boxes over everything you want to photograph.

To use the Ubi-Camera, you stick a your left index finger into a hole on the side. Then you frame up and compose. A detector knows how far your fingers are from your head, and adjust the zoom level accordingly, so it should match what you see through your finger-hole. Thus, moving your fingers closer to your eyes gives a wider angle shot.

DigInfo explains in more detail below.