Slashdot Mirror
I/O Electronic Brush for Painting
karvind writes "BBC is running an interesting story about the I/O Brush developed by Kimiko Ryokai, researcher at the MIT Media Labs. The device allows a person to pick up colours and textures from their environment and paint with them on a large digital screen. At the tip of the brush is a tiny video camera enclosed by a ring-shaped brush. LEDs are used for illumination, and pressure sensors to trigger image capture. The camera captures one frame in the normal mode, and a few seconds of video in movie mode. The brush "paints" the captured image or movie onto a back-projected touch screen."
It looks like an interesting toy, but I don't know how useful it would be to make actual works of art. From what I can see in the pictures, it looks too big and awkward to do any detail work. It's too bad, really, because a much smaller, stylus-sized version of this would be a lot of fun for image manipulation and digital art. It would be a lot easier to get colours right when painting from life anyway :)
This seems like a fantastic installation for an interactive meuseum. Or, make a USB version and we can set it up on the PC and let Junior go nuts. It'd also do well on consoles, I think. Hmm, this might have more application than I first thought!
I imagine with a little craftwork, a cheap USB camera and a little FOSS you could make one of these yourself.
Author of Enyo: Up and Running from O'Reilly Media
I have to say I really like the idea and think it's great. However, making an object a paint brush seems to be just an unimaginative copy of the tool for the physical world. It would seem to me that the brush interface would just be silly at best and interfere with usage at worst.
Sure if the idea of this brush is to sell it to artists or other adults mimicking an interface they are comfortable with might be best. However, this is a limitation of adults they project onto children thinking of them like limited innocent versions of adults. Children are exceptionally good at learning new interfaces and ways of controlling things and it is probably a good experience for them as well.
It just seems kinda silly to me that we repeat this same silly duplication of old interfaces each time. When cars were first invented people tried to put reigns on them along with many other examples I can't remember. I'm just surprised we haven't learned yet that new technologies generally demand new interfaces...then again since it usually takes a generation to become familiar with the new interfaces it may be too much to hope that the designers would ever see this.
(Note this isn't a real criticism just a general observation and nit picking)
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
1) Revolutionary way to develop creativity, artistic design, and low level education to children. Would replace wasteful and hectic coloring books, child artbooks, and maybe open gate to accept fully digital books. A world of application.
-or-
2) Another technological development overlooked and not cared for, ending up with countless other technological developments. Though some of which were brought back after years in the garbage pile, when widely or purposeful applicable use appears. However, most remain there, which it seems this would be the destiny of this particular gadget.
You're funny!
But seriously, given the nature of the device, which is used for creating art, the gigantic paint brush seems like some sort of artistic expression in itself.