My Tricorder is called ‘Damera’. It is striving to be a perfect recreation of the iOS default camera app, except for one thing: It only takes pictures of dogs. I find myself taking pictures of all kinds of things, some good and some bad, but myself and a few others in the studio found it might make the world a slightly more wholesome if all that was allowed to be photographed were dogs. Whenever I scroll through the gallery on this app, I definitely feel a lot calmer than when I do on my normal photos app.
I have a slight obsession with redrawing interfaces and I love to add a weird twist to them. For that I chose the absurd camera button, going back and forth between a prohibitive sign indicating that all non-dog photos are not allowed and a nice, happy Corgi. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of React Native troubleshooting to go to replicate a lot of the UI elements that would make it funny such as having a carousel of options such as ‘people’, ‘pano’, ‘dog’ etc. Additional attention to detail is required on the typographic elements as well as app icon if I want to make it a perfect recreation of the original Camera.
As far as technical implementation goes, the most interesting thing for me was learning about coreML on iOS. Apple distributes a mobilenet trained on imagenet on their developer downloads page that’s extremely fast and able to identify a somewhat hilarious number of dog breeds. I use this model against the camera feed and check its outputs. If it matches any of the known classifications, I enable the shutter button.
[Video Documentation and Gallery Coming Soon]