ITP Thesis Archive 2025

Project Description

Photography is an art of selection and subtraction: every shutter-click chisels reality into a new shape. Lepus is a family of three hand-built cameras that asks what truly guides those choices and how digital tools might make them more playful.
• Lepus CV overturns expectation. A Raspberry Pi 5 and custom computer-vision pipeline remix the image the instant it is taken—erasing passers-by, isolating text, or applying generative edits—so the result never perfectly matches the viewfinder.
• Lepus HEX deepens spatial awareness. Six synchronized lenses and displays capture every side of a moment, including the photographer, exposing the hidden role our own body plays in framing.
• Lepus V shifts perspective into virtual reality. A paired physical/VR camera lets artists shoot inside simulated worlds and print their “virtual photographs” in real time, confronting the thin border between digital and tangible space.
All three share a uniform, open-source architecture: a Pi 5 “brain” for Linux-level processing, a Pico microcontroller “reflex” for real-time I/O, and optional cloud compute for heavier models. By sculpting both hardware and software, the project probes a core question: If what we see is always mediated—by optics, by sensors, by code—where does photographic truth begin and end?
Through Lepus I embrace that uncertainty, inviting viewers to reconsider how expectation, spatial context, and viewpoint co-author every image we make.

Photography, understood as an art of selection and subtraction, can be likened to sculpting reality: we chisel out the truths, dreams, and sometimes illusions that frame our perception of the world. My research explores this act of framing through both theoretical inquiry and hands-on experimentation, culminating in the design and construction of my own cameras. By doing so, I seek not only to document what is before me but also to question the presumed authenticity of the photographic image.

Technical Details

Lepus is composed of two boards: one runs a Raspberry Pi 5 as the operating system, and the other uses a Pico as the MCU. It features an MS2130 chip as the capture card, a GLK823 chip as the card reader, and a power module based on a BQ24078 + TPS61088 circuit combined with three parallel 18650 batteries, providing 5V/5A linear charging and battery status management. It also includes a BMS/protection board, PTC protection, TVS/ESD suppression, and thermal monitoring on its PCB shield. Additionally, there are screw terminal expansions for all Raspberry Pi GPIO pins, allowing easy integration of multiple sensors, buttons, and displays. Lepus runs a full 64-bit Linux system, capable of running any ARM-compatible software or machine learning models.

Research/Context

Photography is an art of selection and subtraction, much like sculpture. It sculpts reality itself: from the world we carve our own truths, others’ truths, dreams, or even lies—every ingredient of existence. I am profoundly fascinated by this process and seek to explore, understand, and extend it by designing and building my own camera as both tool and inquiry.
Framing, for me, has always held a kind of magic; deciding what to keep and what to discard moves me in a way that’s hard to put into words. In this thesis research, I want to delve into the notion of “taking and leaving” in photography—where each choice to include or exclude becomes its own form of creation. Below is the context and background of how I have approached and experimented with this magical act of framing.
1. The “Transparent” Observer on the Street: The Subtle Relationship Between Photographer and the World
Whenever I lift a camera, it’s as if I’ve put on an invisibility cloak. In street photography, I often feel I don’t belong to the scene and can’t affect it—like a transparent bystander who’s been forgotten by the world, yet derives a certain sense of safety from that anonymity. The camera emboldens me to venture into places I normally wouldn’t dare go. That sense of being “unrelated” to the world somehow allows me to get closer to an authentic reality.
Still, the photographer is never truly absent from the photo. Our presence is an indispensable part of every frame. To explore that presence, I came up with the concept of a six-sided camera. Each side has its own lens and display. When I’m framing a shot, only the screen I’m directly facing is lit, showing me the view I’m about to capture. But once I press the shutter, all the lenses fire simultaneously—capturing not only the scene straight ahead but also my left and right, above and below, and even me, the photographer. In a single shot, the world I’m seeing is recorded alongside the “me” who is being seen. Rather than a simple one-way lens relationship, it becomes a moment of mutual gaze, where subject and photographer alike enter the image together.
2. From Optical Viewfinders to Electronic Viewfinders: The Quiet Rise of VR Photography
In the days of optical cameras, the viewfinder was like a clear piece of glass—transparent and true to life. Peering through it, you saw the world nearly as your eyes did. Now, however, with the rise of digital technology, our camera viewfinders have become tiny electronic screens. Behind that screen, a sensor captures light and sends the data through electronic processing before projecting it back to us as an image. When we adjust exposure, compose our shots, or focus, we’re basing these decisions on a digitally rendered view—something designed to look real, yet is ultimately an engineered interpretation.
In a way, we’ve been practicing a form of “VR photography” ever since digital cameras came about. It was only with the popularity of head-mounted VR devices that we realized: there’s a whole other world outside the screen. Inspired by that revelation, I started thinking: if we’re already relying on digital projections, why not bring photography completely into a VR space, so that “photography in the virtual realm” and “photography in the real realm” can actively reflect and contrast each other? When images from a VR camera are instantly printed, we might come face-to-face with the question of what, if anything, constitutes true reality—or whether absolute reality exists at all.
3. Moments That Cannot Be Proven: Childhood Memories and the Magic of the Camera
I’ve never forgotten an experience from my childhood, when I used a Panasonic D-Lux 5 to photograph a fox. We were in a forest park, catching cicadas, but I was busy snapping photos while my friends focused on their hunt. Suddenly, I saw a flicker of movement in the distant grass. I raised the camera, glimpsed a blurry shape on the electronic screen, and pressed the shutter—but all I got was a vague silhouette. I exclaimed, “Look, over there!” Yet by the time my friends turned around, the fox was gone.
Later, retracing the events in my mind, I realized I hadn’t actually “seen” the fox with my own eyes. All I saw was its ghostlike figure on the camera’s tiny monitor—and even that was fleeting. My friends hadn’t seen it either, so our only evidence was this blurred photo. We used it to convince one another that a fox had probably been there. In my head, I even wondered if the camera might have “drawn” that instant by itself, unnoticed. In the end, there was no way to be sure: did we really see the fox? Was it truly there, or just a phantom conjured up by digital signals on a screen?
That childhood memory seared one big question into my mind: Is the world shown in our digital cameras really the same world we see with our own eyes? As we navigate infinite streams of pixels and image processing, how much certainty can we place in any “truth” at all? And just how much do the photos we snap prove that a moment ever actually took place?
4. “What You See Isn’t What You Get”—From the Act of Framing to Image-Generation Experiments
This doubt led me to rethink the very nature of “framing.” We tend to assume photography guarantees “what you see is what you get”: press the shutter, and you’ll end up with an image that matches what you saw in the viewfinder. But given the gap between reality and electronic signals, I became increasingly intrigued by what happens if “what you see isn’t what you get.” Would photography’s usual narrative still hold up? What might happen to our “framing experience?”
In an attempt to probe these questions, I experimented with multiple visual models on a camera, resulting in two prototype projects:
1. A camera that automatically erases people
During the imaging process, it detects and removes any human presence in the frame. Once the people vanish, all that remains is a more desolate, uncanny scene—a landscape stripped of human traces. It compels us to consider the meaning of human memory and a sort of collective nostalgia, where human presence is edited out.
2. A camera that only photographs text—and then turns that text into images
Out in the streets, advertisements or fragments of novels become triggers for my imagination. Instead of capturing the ad or printed words directly, the camera first recognizes the text, then transforms it into a brand-new picture. The outcome rarely matches what was actually in front of the lens. Observing this transformation gave me a fresh perspective on the interplay between language and imagery: When we read text, our minds conjure up images, but when a machine sees text, it produces an entirely different kind of “picture.”
These two “what you see isn’t what you get” cameras made me rethink photography’s boundaries. If we let go of the idea that a shutter click grants us an objective slice of reality, then framing becomes something more akin to re-creation. The photographer’s decisions, the camera’s computational rules, and the soul of the subject being photographed all collaborate in an elusive interplay between the real and the artificial.
5. Searching for Answers Between the Real and the Virtual
From the transparent act of street photography, to the fox that may or may not have graced my childhood photo, to VR shooting and these “what you see isn’t what you get” experiments—my research and practice circle around one core question: What, exactly, does photography record? Does it capture light and color, or does it revolve around the electronic calculation and reconstruction of signals? Is it a faithful reproduction of reality, or is it an inherently subjective, creative intervention? As we rely increasingly on electronic viewfinders and perhaps immerse ourselves in VR cameras, maybe we’re already living in a world where verifying the “real” is no longer possible.
This is precisely why I’ve chosen to build my own camera by hand—to push the magical act of framing even further, exploring the infinite possibilities that arise in the tension between selection and omission. By crafting this unique tool, I enter into a conversation not only with the world but also with myself, hoping to create a new kind of landscape that bridges imagery and reality, emotion and logic. It reminds me of that fox from my childhood photo: was it truly a visitor to our world, or did the camera itself bestow upon it a brief existence? Behind every image woven from real and unreal threads, there’s a quiet invitation to delve deeper: Which version of the world do we truly wish to see?