Point and shoot: AI generates location-specific photo inspirations

New Velocity company Lookr maximizes photography ideas in seconds

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Media Relations

Lookr, a new company at Velocity, University of Waterloo’s startup incubator, takes inspiration beyond the search engine and uses on-location spatial information and artificial intelligence to inspire creators to capture the perfect shot. 

Photographers, journalists, and content creators — anyone producing quality photography content — can point their camera to a desired backdrop, Lookr’s AI generates ideas, and, in a matter of seconds, the user can capture the shot using angles and concepts that could otherwise be missed. The company joined Velocity earlier this fall as it looks to scale the distribution of its proprietary artificial intelligence-powered app. 

“Lookr scans where the user is and understands the spatial attributes, puts that into an AI model and generates inspirational photos,” said co-founder Yuki Li (BASc ‘22). “Lookr’s core feature is search efficiency: instead of inputting keywords into a search engine, users can just scan their surroundings — the inspiration is directly related to the user’s reality.”

Co-founder Bill Chi is an artificial intelligence researcher whose work has been published in popular science journals such as Nature. 

He said Lookr’s ethos is to empower creators to use AI to enhance their work, not to outsource creative work to computer models. 

Read the full article from Waterloo News to learn more.