| I/O
Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements
found in everyday materials by "picking up" and drawing
with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but
has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded
inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color,
texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists
can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from
their immediate environment.
There
are many paint/drawing programs on the market today that are designed
especially for kids. These let kids do neat things, but kids usually
end up playing only with the "preprogrammed" digital palette
the software provides. The idea of I/O Brush is to let the kids
build their own ink. They can take any colors, textures, and movements
they want to experiment with from their own environment and paint
with their personal and unique ink. Kids are not only exploring
through construction of their personal art project, but they are
also exploring through construction of their own tools (i.e., the
palette/ink) to build their art project with. |
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The
Brush
Most drawing tools/pens we use today allow only a one-way flow
of ink, and we are oblivious to how the content of the tool
came to exist inside. What if we could not only have control
over the outflow of the ink, but also have influence on what
goes inside? Indeed,
old fountain pens served as both tools to pick up and release
the ink, and paintbrushes still preserve that function. We bring
back this tradition of a drawing tool as both an input and output
device, but instead of picking up the liquid ink, I/O Brush
lifts up and captures photons.
In
our current prototype, the brush houses a small CCD video camera
in its tip with a ring of white LEDs around it. Force sensors
are also embedded inside of the brush, measuring the pressure
that is getting applied to the bristles. When the brush touches
a surface, the lights around the camera briefly turn on to provide
supplemental light for the camera. During that time, the system
grabs the frames from the camera and stores them in the program.
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The
Canvas
On
the canvas, the brush lets the artist draw with that special ink
s/he has just picked up. We
currently use a large touch screen with a back projection screen.
Our current development includes the technology that allows artistic
creations not only to be appreciated from a fixed point in time,
but as an active portrait with the memory of its process of creation.
This way, the stories about the evolving creation are part of the
creation that could be shared, and hopefully appreciated by its
viewers. The brush strokes artists make on the canvas will be linked
to the movies that documents where the artist’s had picked
up that certain materials so that the portrait can take both artist
and audience back through the journey and reveal the stories behind
the special palette of colors.
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