Ryokai / Ishii: I/O Brush

Want to paint with textures sampled from the world around you? I/O Brush is your ticket. By embedding video, light and touch sensors in a standard paintbrush it allows you to sample textures, colors and even video sequences without any external user interface. These can then be used to paint on a projected surface using motion capture. Intended for use by young children, the I/O Brush is a tool for play and exploration. A full paper on the project is available.

A product of MIT’s Tangible Media Group and credited to Kimiko Ryokai and Hiroshi Ishii (the Professor of the group), I/O Brush bears all the hallmarks of a Tangible Media project. It focuses on simple ideas for applying computational techniques to physical environments. Technology is made transparent and immaterial, transforming physical objects into intelligent tools while avoiding classic computer interface conventions. Anyone interested in classic Human-Computer Interaction issues are sure to pick up some tips from their projects and papers.

For reasons not completely clear, it appears that there was fierce rivalry between Ishii’s Tangible Media and John Maeda’s Aesthetics & Computation groups. One would think they had similar objectives, but perhaps different methods.