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."

Comments

Re:That's so 2004

[horror_vacui]

I work at the Ars Electronica Center and I can confirm that it's not really news, the I/O brush having been exposed there for a rather long time.

Like most exhibits in the AEC, the I/O brush is not meant to be useful in the praxis, but rather to show new ways of interaction that new technologies offer - like 'moonies', a project where you can chase butterflies projected on a screen of vapour, or 'scrapple', a kind of reversal of virtual reality (which is basically a music sampler, only you create music not by editing the track on the screen, but by putting real objects of various shapes on a grid projected on a table). And lots of others, which are along the same lines - 'conspiratio', 'music box' etc. See for yourself on http://www.aec.at/en/festival2005/programm/allproj ects.asp

It seems like especially kids love the I/O brush, resulting in high amounts of tear and wear on the hardware.

Re:Slavish replication of physical tools

[logicnazi]

Yes, I agree that if your goal is to make adults feel immediatly comfortable with something and quickly understand what it is good for a brush metaphor is best. However, it is a different thing to say that a metaphor communicates what something does and what it is good for/how to use it. The brush metaphore doesn't communicate what this device does; it would be a bad idea to try to paint your wall with this or dip it in real paint. You still have to explain what the device does explicitly as slashdot did in the story description (though not necessarily as technically). Just as with the computer desktop or any other control metaphor the point is to give people familiar with the old technology an immediate idea what this device is good for and how they should relate to it.

I agree that it takes a long time to develop a good interface (though I think the basic car interface: steering wheel, gas, break is essentially fixed and will only change again when people no longer manually control the car). However, I think this process is only prolonged by developers telling people how they should think of and relate to a device by using a metaphor of some existing technology. Children are certainly more immune to this implied instruction about what you should and shouldn't use this technology for but I don't know if they are completely.

I mean if your goal was to do UI research and figure out how people used the device the last thing you would want to do is prejudge the issue for them by packaging it just like some other technology.

Still, I suppose it is probably a necessery evil to get funding and potentially have the technology picked up by other adults. Trying to explain you made a stick with a camera in it is probably not going to get you anywhere near the immediate understanding of the benefits of your project as making it a paint brush will. Still, even if it isn't the case here I definatly think adults often impede children by supposing they need the same sort of familiar clues adults do.