It’s surely innovative, although I wonder what the merits are to having a chunk of glass where you’d have a display. The advantages of a display are A. replication accuracy, B. aren’t as fragile as glass, and C. can display things like menus, guides, metadata, but designer Deepak Kumar believes having a curved concave slab of glass (with a curvature that matches the focal length of the camera lens) would result in a more unique experience. The glass slab would have a few obvious pitfalls. A. Glass is fragile, B. You’d have to hold the camera at a specific distance from your face to see things in the viewfinder perfectly, and C. Parallax. You have to look at the glass at an exact 90° angle to see your composition clearly.

Nevertheless, the LUCID camera takes on an approach one would say is analog. I’d honestly love to see a camera with a massive glass viewfinder, just so I could be much more aware while composing my shots, and possibly being rather surprised by what photos I actually end up clicking. This would be a very interesting accessory for a GoPro if someone could build it!

Designer: Deepak Kumar