Tuesday

AirPaint [iPhone]

AirPaint allows you to paint in air with your iPhone. It uses the built-in accelerometer to estimate how you move the iPhone when painting a stroke in air and the stroke is then displayed on screen. 

Inspired by light graffiti, AirPaint brings the concept of long exposure in photography to the iPhone. Light graffiti is a method of capturing light motion in the air using camera’s long exposure (see guide). Work by  lichtfaktor is a great example. AirPaint unfortunately offers only a small portion of this type of painting by only utilizing iPhone’ accelerometer. One can’t help but feel slightly disappointed by the limited set of features in this app especially considering the possibilities that exist. One of these could be the ability to create a form of photo collage using the iPhone’s camera and air drawing with ability to overlay/position your drawing in space/your photo with scalability and perspective transformation. Another great element that would really make this app exciting is ability to set Z value variable, ie movement in depth/third dimension. One would then be able to set a variable of lets say 2 meters and when you move your iPhone it would reconstruct your graffiti in three dimensions. You could then overlay this onto the photo your earlier had taken. Of course, this is a lot more programing but nevertheless a great opportunity for the app to seriously appeal to all those interested in light graffiti and those that have not tried it because of all the tools required to produce attractive results.

The developer writes:
If you know physics you’ll know that acceleration data alone is not enough information to recreate the stroke, so this application uses physics-based methods to guess how your hand moved based on the acceleration data. As a result, it is fairly easy to paint simple shapes like squares and circles, but more advanced shapes are harder and provides a fun challenge.

Nevertheless, this is a good start for an app that could really evolve into something big. User uploads, online community, tip sharing, photo effects, marking locations of where you drew your graffiti and allowing others to compete/overlay theirs and much, much more is what we would like to see.

We are optimistic, but it’s down to the developer to explore these opportunities. For the moment, there is not much more than you see in the video below. We look forward to seeing future updates and hope that the developer will explore some of these possibilities.

Platform: iPhone
Cost: $0.99
Developer: Trapcode
Download

 ★★½☆☆