With the new system from Light Strokes, users can employ a wide variety of brushes, or even their fingers, to paint within applications such as Photoshop.
 Light Strokes technology was originally custom-built into exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and other museums. The OptiPaint system consists of optical and electronic hardware that tracks the changing shapes of real-world objects such as brushes, combined with a Photoshop-compatible plugin. Painting gestures are captured by a video camera that images just the points of contact between brushes and the painting surface at up to 60 frames/sec.
The plugin supports painting with three basic effects—painting in a solid color, painting with a blend of the solid color and a texture color, and blurring—each of which can be applied with different levels of transparency and employ any physical painting tool. Initially available for Windows, a Macintosh version is said to be under development.
The OptiPaint system will make its first public appearance at the Photoshop World Conference and Expo in Las Vegas, running September 7 and 8. More information is available on the OptiPaint.com site. |
