This thing is so cool:
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.
Be sure to watch the videos to see this thing really work.
Comments
My brother and I do the MIT Mystery Hunt every year (see for more info: http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle). MIT has a lot of toys and interesting things in their hallways. One of which, at the Media Lab (where this brush came from), is a HUGE television screen with all sorts of craziness on it. A couple of examples: a closeup of a dog lapping milk from a small glass, weird illusions using fulcrums and uneven rooms, etc. I’m not surprised to see such an excellent and strange device come out of the Media Lab. Ah MIT.