Making Digital Leaf Collages with Blow Painting! Yang-Ting Shen School of Literature, Communications & Culture Georgia Institute of Technology bowbowshen@gatech.edu Ellen Yi-Luen Do College of Architecture & School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology ellendo@gatech.edu Abstract We present a novel play interface called Blow Painting that enables people to create leaf collage paintings on a digital canvas by blowing at a toy windmill. The toy windmill detects the blowing action and direction with its embedded microphone and rotation sensor. Four kinds of leaf “stencils” (Red Maple, Sugar Maple, Hickory and White Oak) are embedded in the transparent RFID sheets to be placed under the windmill for the play interaction. We describe the motivation, system components, an informal pilot test, and discuss directions for future work. ACM Classification Keywords B.4.2 Hardware, D.m Software, H.5.2 User Interfaces, J.0 Computer Applications General Terms Design, Human Factors Author Keywords Blowing, painting, leaf stencils, tangible object, RFID, collage, daily experience, embodiment, interaction, play BLOWING (IN) THE WIND Blowing is a natural act. It is spontaneous. It is fun. A child may pick up a dandelion and blow it to see the seeds flying (Figure 1 left). Blowing dandelions is intuitive. Everyone knows how to do it. We don’t need special skills to master the interaction. Therefore, we chose blowing action as an interface to engage children of all ages (!) to create leaf collages in a playful manner. Figure 1. Left: A child blows a dandelion (photo credit: Maksim [5]). Right: A nature leaf collage Blowing is an intriguing act. The airflow or the wind is invisible, but it can be heard and felt. Our question is: what would it be like to create an embodiment experience with the act of blowing? Can we make the ephemeral visible? The answer, my friend, is not just blowing in the wind. Nature itself often makes beautiful collage of leaves (Figure 1 right). The colorful foliage, the variety of color and shapes are simply irresistible. It’s a magical experience that inspires artists of all ages. Therefore, we take this real world experience as an inspiration for our play design. We try to create a novel blowing interaction play to simulate the wind’s painting, to bring out one's creative genius, and perhaps capturing a little bit of the glory of the wonderful fall colors on the digital canvas for all to enjoy. INTRODUCTION Tangible interfaces are increasingly replacing the traditional window and pointing devices for interaction design. For example, people can now interact with augmented physical space with their emotions [4] and motions [1] or use the I/O Brush [6] to “pick up” colors, textures and movements in everyday materials and draw with it. The KidsRoom [3] tracks children’s positions and motions to transform the physical environment into virtual fantasy play space. THE BLOW PAINTING SYSTEM The Blow Painting system is inspired by the natural wind shaped leaf collages. It also leverages the cognitive benefits of using articulated joints that would help facilitate concept mapping and reflections of the real world phenomenon [2]. Figure 2. The tangible object of the Blowing Painting system To detect the blowing action and to guide the painting directions on the digital canvas we need a tangible object a person of any age can relate to and interact with. A toy windmill is ideal because the form encourages people to blow at the pinwheel. The painting of leaves would appear on the digital canvas when a player blows at the windmill. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. TEI 2010, April 4–9, 2010, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-60558-246-7/09/04...$5.00. 265