Turn Your Smartphone into an AI-Powered Micro-Four-Thirds Camera

Introducing the Alice Camera

Developed by a company called Photogram out of the United Kingdom, the project’s goal is to bring the experience of a phone, but with the quality of a DSLR. As you can see in the images and videos, the camera attaches to the outside of your smartphone so that your iOS or Android device can work as a monitor where you’ll be able to control the shot.

The Alice Camera itself will feature a micro-four thirds lens interchangeable lens mount and includes a Sony 4/3″ HDR dual-native ISO CMOS sensor as well. The whole thing is made out of Aluminum and is capable of recording 4K video at 30fps (or 1080p at 60fps), plus includes some nice recording features like auto exposure, auto white balance, and auto-focus controls.

The Alice Camera also includes a 3.5mm microphone jack and can record to Micro SD cards. It charges via USB-C and has a 500 mAh battery as well.

An AI-Powered Smartphone Camera

Still, the big story here might simply be the “AI-powered” tag. Powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon and Google Edge TPU chips as the Alice Camera’s primary processing units, this device should be able to run a host of AI tools and features that you won’t find in many smartphones or digital cameras.

For example, all of the auto-exposure, auto-focus, and auto-ISO controls will be AI-powered and it sounds like Photogram is hoping to work with developers to further customize the camera’s AI-features for custom apps or other requested needs in the future.

Price and Availability

As mentioned at the start, the Alice Camera was just launched on IndieGogo with the goal of raising over $25,000 in pre-orders. The base “perk” or purchase option currently sits at $762 with a 20% discount already applied, so we’d expect the price to remain around that—or perhaps higher—once fully released.

Units are expected to start shipping later this summer.