© Photogram AI

The film industry is going through a dramatic change as AI technology plays an even bigger part in content production. The 'traditional' photographic art form is in the midst of an existential crisis, similar in scale to when digital replaced film twenty years ago. Camera companies have been making faster glass, bigger sensors, as well as complex and heavy mechanical solutions - but it's not the change people are looking for. And smartphones are beginning to disrupt content production, providing creators with the ability to control their low-quality optical systems to produce higher quality stills. A smartphone's most important aspects are now its computational power and ease of use.

Sales of interchangeable lens cameras have collapsed almost ten-fold since 2010 (the same year Instagram was founded). Yet professionals still use interchangeable lens cameras because high-quality lenses and large imaging sensors provide far superior raw images than those produced by a smartphone. Applying AI techniques in these systems would increase efficiency, unlock new creative possibilities, and drive the photographic art form forward. But rather than rise to this challenge, camera manufacturers are still focused on DSLR. They are however at risk of falling behind, as was the case for Kodak when people started buying digital cameras.

Cog X - Alice Camera™

Photogram AI is about to change all that with its solution to the camera industry's woes with the Alice Camera™, a novel AI camera being built in Britain from the ground up for modern photography and content creators. The Alice Camera will feature an interchangeable lens system, a professional-quality imaging sensor and AI-enabled hardware to run the latest computational photography algorithms. The team at Photogram AI are taking a radically different approach to what currently exists in the market. They are merging the best elements of interchangeable lens cameras and smartphones into one device. Photogram AI presented their concept for the first time in November 2019 at the Beyond Conference, the UK’s annual R&D conference for the creative industries, and have been selected as one of the Createch Ones to Watch at the CogX 2020 Artificial Intelligence festival.

The Alice Camera will have better connectivity than a DSLR, and will produce higher quality images than a smartphone. Photogram AI’s core value proposition is to offer photographers, filmmakers and content creators a camera that is easy to carry around, one which makes post-processing efficient, with an intuitive user experience and connectivity to share content instantly. In addition, it will be an open device that gives you access to the underlying software to deeply customise the creative process all without compromising on quality and at an affordable price.

© Photogram.ai

Photogram AI crosses the boundaries between deep tech and the creative industries with a mission to empower creatives with the modern technology to enhance their art form. The company was founded in July 2019 on the 12th cohort of Entrepreneur First, a deep tech accelerator in London, and is at the intersection of artificial intelligence and IoT, as well as creativity, photography and consumer goods. Photogram AI is now incubated at the UCL Innovation & Enterprise Incubator in King's Cross, London and is on the Digital Catapult Machine Intelligence Garage programme and NVIDIA AI’s virtual accelerator. They are working with Bournemouth-based Aetha Design as their product and industrial design consulting partner and London & Partners, the Mayor of London's PR agency, as their business growth advisers.

Interchangeable lens cameras have lacked meaningful innovation over the last ten years. And Photogram AI have spent the last ten months building the Alice Camera because they believe that content creators deserve an optical device more suitable for our world of digital photography. The Alice Camera is still under development but is set to be announced to the public for the first time on Monday 6th July 2020.

Photogram will then be launching an IndieGoGo campaign in Autumn 2020 and the Alice Camera will be limited to 1,000 units.

You can sign up on the Photogram AI website to be notified of the launch.