InstaCRT – A “real world” iPhone filter for photos

InstaCRT is a project and an iPhone camera app by Martin Ström, Ruben Broman and Erik Wåhlström. The project started as an idea to see how a “real world” filter for photos (like the popular Histamatic and Instagram apps) would work, except their filter is actually real and not digitally applied.

There are two components to the project – an iPhone app and a hardware setup that includes a Canon 7D camera, an old CRT display and an old MacBookPro. When someone takes a picture using the iPhone app, the image is automatically uploaded to a REST server. The macbook then uses a Ruby script to feth images from the REST server, download them and show them in fullscren on the old CRT display using Quartz Composer. The Canon 7D then takes a photo of the CRT display, sent back to the user that took the photo and also uploaded to public Tumblr site.