VIRTUAL PENCIL AND BRUSH

More thoughts on evolving digital drawing interfaces.

SensAble Technologies, a digital interface company operating in the 1990s, manufactured a handheld controller which gave users the virtual sensation of actually touching onscreen objects.  In their Phantom interface, you would put your fingers into sewing sized thimbles, and it felt like you were touching the object.  So if you saw say a brick on the screen, you would move your hand as if you were picking up the brick, and a touch sensation of brick would be returned to you.

Then I thought, ok, what if all of our analogue drawing tools become virtual?  That is to ask, what would / will it be like to make a drawing by virtually manipulating a pencil or a brush?  What would be the overall experience to make a drawing with virtual drawing tools?  This is where it only feels like you are holding a pencil in your hand.  The essence of analogue drawing is hand eye coordination.  So if you are still moving your hand, but are not manipulating a pencil or a brush.  Will this still be analogue drawing?

Before we try to answer that, let’s take this a step further.  A company called Leap Motion has created a digital interface that reads your hand movements.  There are no thimbles like in the SensAble Technologies interface.  With the Leap Motion, you would be able to virtually pick up a pencil simply by moving your hand in free space.  You would shape your hand the same way that you would to hold a pencil, it is just that there would be no object.  Not even thimbles.  Will this still be analogue drawing?

Actually, this question is kind of depressing.  There is no doubt that the vast technological trajectory is to make everything digital.  Yet if my two thought experiments are valid, will we really have to virtualize the pencil and the brush?  The lowly pencil?

Quite possibly you can call me Chicken Little.  Indeed the sky may not be falling that severely.  Or this may indeed be tilting at windmills.

Yet it is important to track the evolution of our digital interface systems.  In the all analogue pages of Transparent Drawing, how digital interface systems are advancing continues to add value to what these pages represent.  How far out the digital systems go only reinforces the humane / human value of what we believe in here.

I continue to like the Transparent Digital Interface first floated out, at least to my knowledge, in these pages.  This interface would simply scan your transparent drawing and produce a working three dimensional working model of your forms.  I just think that if we have to digitize, then what would be better than an interface that combines the best of both worlds?

There should be an app for that.