Despite its overall lackluster performance, the Rabbit R1 is nearly worth purchasing due to its amazing camera mode. With its generative AI photo options, which let AI reconstruct the scene it’s given, Magic Camera is fundamentally quite similar to Google’s offering. The R1 is distinct not only because of its distinctive design but also because of the way its flaws are harnessed to make the gadget enjoyable to use. With the R1 and AI photography, I’ve never enjoyed it more than I do now. And this is the reason.
If the Magic Camera feature on the R1 is unfamiliar to you, don’t worry. You won’t recognize the R1 if you disregarded it at the time and haven’t given it any attention since, as it was included in a software update many weeks after the first reviews were out. The Magic Camera, which can transform R1 photographs into entirely new looks, is not a mode on the Rabbit R1 device. Rather, it is an AI image generator that resides in the cloud. Using the Magic Camera is quite simple, which is fantastic news.
To snap an image with the Rabbit R1, just aim its camera at your subject and push the side button twice. You can stop here and continue without having to take any action, but this is where the R1 and its Magic Camera first exhibit what we’ll refer to as an idiosyncrasy. On the device, neither the original image nor the one created by the Magic Camera are visible.
Instead, you have to go down the Rabbithole — and I’m not just being cute with my wording. The Rabbithole is the name for the Rabbit R1’s online portal, where all the content captured and generated by the R1 is stored and displayed. You’ll need to grab your phone or head to your computer to see the photos from the R1, but rather than being a downside (and going against the whole “phone replacement” thing with the R1), it somehow adds to the excitement for me. It’s almost like waiting for film to be developed after taking photos on vacation.
I love the Magic Camera because it takes the most mundane, ordinary, and badly composed photos and makes something fun and eye-catching from them. It’s also wonderfully unconcerned with the subject matter at times, which allows it to make something new from the original rather than simply adapting it. But when it is aware of details in a photo, it then builds its reimagined image around some of those aspects. It’s creative in the best way.
The first photo of my MacBook next to a muffin is poorly framed, taken without any care at all, and would be one I’d delete from my phone at any other time. But the Magic Camera ignores all this and makes a charming image from it. Everything is there, from the phone to the flowers, in what you’ll soon see is the R1’s trademark pixel art-style look. The second photo was an accident.
I was testing the R1’s visual search to see if it could tell me the name of the person on the calendar (the R1 didn’t know, but it’s Korean actress and singer Kang Hye-won), only to find the photo had been given the Magic Camera treatment when I visited the Rabbithole. It takes all the elements from the photo and even maintains the sunny, early-morning ambiance in its recreation. See the rabbit on the couch? That’s the Magic Camera’s mascot, and there’s almost always a rabbit hidden somewhere in its images.
The final photo here shows the R1 recognizing the Porsche emblem on the steering wheel and then keeping it in the Magic Camera image, but then populating the world beyond the windshield with Porsche-like vehicles. Amusingly, it decided to make my right-hand drive car left-hand drive — and a manual to boot — all at the same time. It often gets even more creative, too, coming up with completely new interpretations of phones and watches and transforming you into someone entirely different for selfies.
I love how much fun the Magic Camera can be, and it does a very good job of hiding how terrible the R1’s camera actually is. The quality is very poor, with no detail, washed-out colors, and a measly 1080 x 1080 pixel resolution, meaning the photos it takes are never ones you’ll want to keep. The Magic Camera photos have an even lower resolution, just 1024 x 1024 pixels, but the pixel art style and digitally rendered detail make the most out of it.
Perhaps even worse than the quality of the photos is the actual experience of taking them with the R1. The screen, even at maximum brightness, is almost impossible to see outside in the daylight. You can squint and just about make out what’s in the frame, but there’s no opportunity to compose a photo. You just point it in the direction of something when you’re outdoors and hope for the best. But it doesn’t matter because Magic Camera isn’t worried about any of this.
The Rabbit R1’s camera is really basic, its screen is essentially unusable outside of an enclosed space, and it shoots poor quality pictures. The shutter of the camera reacts slowly, and you can’t close the camera after taking a picture because it takes some time to process the image. It ranks among the least pleasing cameras I’ve tried in the last year, right up there with the Nokia 3210. However, the Magic Camera completely ignores the fact that it is a subpar camera, which is why I am making an effort to capture pictures with it.
The Rabbit R1’s camera has many limitations that make it difficult to be creative with. Fortunately, I don’t need to be creative because the AI takes my terrible shots and turns them into oddball, striking, and distinctive images. I can confidently state that I just took the images that served as inspiration for the Magic Camera and did not capture any of its images myself. This will either delight you or make you feel depressed, depending on how you feel about AI taking on an increasingly creative role.
While consumer AI now focuses on productivity and other tedious but essential features, I purchased the Rabbit R1 in the hopes of discovering some personality. Magic Camera has some of that individuality, and I love that its programmers took the time to give each of its photographs a unique, unified identity instead of just letting it do something different each time or offering us the option to tweak the final product with keywords. It is entertaining to watch AI having fun like this.
Rabbit unveiled Freestyle, a brand-new Magic Camera function, right before we were set to publish this article. With this capability, you may instruct the camera on how to produce AI-generated images, for example, “take a picture of this and turn it into a pencil sketch.” This is intriguing, however I’ve found that seeing the AI come up with ideas on its own without my input has been more entertaining. Magic Camera has exceeded expectations, even though the rest of the Rabbit R1 has fallen short of them. This is because Magic Camera is allowed complete creative freedom to produce visually arresting photos while adhering to a carefully chosen set of rules that guarantee a consistently distinctive style. The fact that we will have to wait to know the results after getting back home adds even more spice.
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