Matt Richardson gave a great Make: Live talk this afternoon about, among other things, his Descriptive Camera project that he shared recently at an ITP show. He built his project around an Adafruit Mini Thermal Receipt Printer:

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype uses crowd sourcing to output a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of ‘parsable’ metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

(Via Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera site.)