I/O Brush

Not many of us are aware of a device named I/O Brush which aims to wipe out the differences between “painting in the real world” and “painting in computing environment”. It came in existence during the PhD work(2003-05) of Kimiko Ryokai at MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology). At that time, Stefan Marti, who also contributed to the project, was the Research Assistant at MIT Media Lab.

How it works?

The new drawing tool- I/O Brush gives the freedom of exploring colors, textures, and movements found in surrounding objects by "picking up" and start drawing with them. Now, this is very much easy to use and realistic by nature in many ways with those amazing feature. The device looks like a normal physical paintbrush but inside the ring of those bristles, it has a small CCD video camera, and a ring of white LEDs around it. There are force sensors embedded inside the brush, which measure the applied pressure to the bristles. At the time of touching the surface, the LED lights around the camera temporarily turn on to provide required light for the camera. The system captures the frames from the camera during that time and supplies them to the program. The artists can draw with the special "ink" on the canvas they just picked up from their surroundings. A large touch screen is presently being used as the “canvas”.

Uses, achievements and future scopes...

I/O Brush is still a prototype and currently being investigated for a consumer product version of it. At this time I/O Brush is mainly aimed toward kids. The available paint/drawing programs for kids on the market today let them do tidy things, but the kids tend to end up playing only with the digital painting palette that the software provides. The main idea of I/O Brush is to let the kids make their own ink by taking any colors, textures, and movements they would like to experiment with from their own surroundings and paint with it.

I/O Brush has been presented at many events/exhibitions. It has also gotten Gold Award - Industrial Design Society of America 2005 Industrial Design Excellence Award.

I/O Brush video on YouTube(posted by Stefan Marti)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE6ibwYlGtg