This past weekend, a local startup held an exhibition not too far from where I live in Tokyo to show off its idea for an entirely new take on camera hardware. That’s not the sort of thing that happens every weekend, even in Tokyo, so I biked on over to take a look.

VWFNDR is a project started by UX designer Álvaro Arregui Falcón of Nuevo.Tokyo and independent industrial designer Mireia Gordi i Vila. The team later brought on London-based engineer Lucas Seidenfaden, who developed the first working prototype for their concept.

That concept is called Keirin.

Named after the Japanese cycling discipline that takes place on a similarly oval track, the Keirin is a camera focused on panorama photography. Its standout visual feature is a curved OLED touchscreen that wraps around the back panel and houses almost all of the camera’s controls.

That’s the idea, at least. The OLED prototype on show was nonfunctional and not available to touch; it’s there to give a better idea of the eventual industrial design. Even in that state, you could see visual glitches right on the far edge of the panel.

But sitting a few meters away on the neighboring table, you could pick up and use a working prototype of the Keirin, complete with a disassembled version that revealed the hardware inside.

Seidenfaden walked me through the hardware engineering of the prototype, as well as its UI. (VWFNDR has a Substack of its own; Seidenfaden wrote a post that goes into how he engineered the prototype in more detail than I can include here.)

As he explains, this prototype is really just a proof of concept to show that the Keirin’s industrial design and UI can work in practice. It uses off-the-shelf parts, including a Raspberry Pi board and the Pi Camera module, so image quality is not the priority.

The prototype does, however, have a very wide rear-mounted screen that, although it isn’t curved, works well to show off the Keirin’s unique UI. The main idea here is that you can use the full screen as a panoramic viewfinder and swipe in from the right to bring in all the regular manual exposure controls; this is also how you adjust the aspect ratio of the photo.

For example, if you want to take a DSLR-style 3:2 image, you can swipe left until you’re left with the correct aspect ratio on the left half of the screen. If you then want to take a 6:2 XPan-style panorama shot, you can swipe right to hide the UI and use the display’s full width for framing. (The Keirin can save the full capture regardless of which aspect ratio you decide to shoot in.) There’s also a circular physical control dial embedded on the camera’s right side.

It’s a clever, intuitive idea. As someone who loves dedicated camera hardware but has largely switched to phones for photography, recreational or otherwise — all of the photos in this article were taken on the Xiaomi 14 Ultra — I don’t mind the lack of physical controls as much as I might have years ago. While touchscreen-first cameras like the Leica T have often felt compromised, the Keirin’s UI plays to the strengths of the hardware design and the camera’s intended primary use case.

The Keirin is designed around a 60-megapixel full-frame sensor with a 35mm lens. The plan is for the camera to include SSD storage and mobile connectivity so that photos can automatically be saved and backed up to the cloud. VWFNDR has also designed a proprietary magnetic expansion bay — called XPNSNBAY — that uses pogo pins to allow for peripherals like a panoramic optical viewfinder. Another clever accessory is REMOFLSH, a wireless flash unit that directly communicates with the camera’s built-in trigger.

The Keirin might never become a commercial product, and if it does, it’ll be a niche one. (What stills camera isn’t these days?) But it’s been conceived, engineered, and prototyped with such passion and skill for such a small team that it’s impossible not to want to will it into existence.

Oppo, which partners with Hasselblad on its camera technology, offers an XPan-branded mode on its recent high-end phones like the Find X7 Ultra. I actually really enjoy it; it makes use of the fact that phones these days have ultrawide displays to deliver a fun new way to shoot panoramas.

But just as my Leica-branded Xiaomi isn’t going to change any Leica rangefinder owners’ minds, something like the Keirin is plainly on another level. It’s the kind of thoughtful, focused device that, if I had it sitting on my camera shelf right now, would beg to be taken out and used the same way Hasselblad’s XPan film cameras did back in the day.

This story first appeared in Multicore, a technology publication about hardware and design.

Photography by Sam Byford.