The camera obscura (Latin for dark chamber) was a novelty optical invention, and one of the ancestral threads leading to the invention of photography; photographic devices today are still known as cameras.
Simply do it yourself by building a box and punching a hole in one of the walls - voilà! With a small enough aperture, light from only one part of a scene can strike any particular part of the back wall; the smaller the hole, the sharper the image on the back side. The image is always upside-down, (and should be inverted left-right as well?). Some camera obscuras have been built as tourist attractions, though few now survive. An example can be found in Grahamstown in South Africa It was developed in the ancient times.Kelley Turner and Mary Mcgahagin were here.
A small, hand-held version using photographic paper to record the image is known as the pinhole camera.