This is very silly indeed.

Salade Tomate Oignon in Paris seems to be making a bit of a habit of doing outlandish things with Raspberry Pi and other people’s photography. You might remember Layer Cam from a couple of years ago, which allows you to point a sandwich box pretending to be a camera at a landmark and serves up somebody else’s picture of the same thing, using GPS coordinates and Google Image Search.

His newest Raspberry Pi hack, Le Myope (for non-Francophones, that’s The Shortsighted), actually includes a camera – but the results are not what you’d expect. Here’s a bit of video to show you more.

Salade Tomate Oignon says:

Even more imprecise than a blurry polaroid picture, or than a filter-abused instagram shot.
Using the most advanced algorithms based on machine learning and computer vision, here is ‘Le myope’, a short-sighted camera.
The new iteration of the layercam ‘Why are you taking this picture? It’s already on the Internet!’ is a Raspberry Pi based camera, that takes a picture and returns a similar one from Google similar image search.
Use it in a popular place and chances are that you will get the same picture taken by someone else. (That happened with the mural during one of the tests)
Use it in a remote place and get random roughly similar pictures from all over the internet!

This is an extremely daft project which pleased us out of all proportion. You can find code and instructions to build your own at Salade Tomate Oignon’s website. Go forth and take other people’s photographs.