Insta360 Hosts AI Imaging Challenge, Unveils 'Mobile Photographer' Initiative
On October 12, Insta360 held the 2026 Bold Maker Smart Imaging Challenge in Nanjing, bringing together more than 220 young makers for a four-day, three-night prototyping sprint. Fifteen teams reached the finals, competing for 300,000 RMB in cash and 200,000 RMB in prizes. Submitted projects ranged from navigation assistance for visually impaired people and pet oral imaging to sign language recognition and underwater panoramic capture, reflecting a shift in cameras from recording tools to environment-aware devices.
During the event, Qi Lu, head of Insta360's research institute and chief AI officer, outlined the company's AI roadmap that divides smart imaging into four stages: select, shoot, edit, and share. AI is applied to composition and scene interaction, image and audio enhancement, automated editing, and novel content-sharing methods. According to Insta360, the multimodal voice assistant Kira, the cloud-based auto-editing feature "Moments Pro," and the "3D Time Vault" using 3D reconstruction are early implementations of this strategy.
The company also publicly introduced its "Mobile Photographer" initiative for the first time, aiming to let devices autonomously observe scenes, understand subjects, plan movement, and decide when to capture. Qi described the system as "AI as the brain, lens as the eye, drone or robot as the body, and motorized gimbal as the limbs." He noted that the concept was proposed internally six or seven years ago, and advances in embodied AI and large models have renewed its feasibility.
On the technical side, Insta360 is focusing on panoramic vision as an entry point, having developed panoramic depth models, panoramic visual-language datasets, and simulation platforms. The company said these foundational capabilities will be opened to the research community through papers, datasets, and tools. The hackathon also offered external developers a way to test panoramic and AI use cases with real problems, with promising projects potentially incubated for future products.
