Fun with Blow Painting!
Making leaf collages by blowing at toy windmill
Yang-Ting Shen
HCI Program, School of Literature,
Communication and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
bowbowshen@gatech.edu
Ellen Yi-Luen Do
ACME Lab, College of Architecture, School of
Interactive Computing, Health Systems Institute
Georgia Institute of Technology
ellendo@gatech.edu
ABSTRACT
blowing action and to guide the painting directions on the
digital world we need a tangible object that a child can
relate to and interact with. A toy windmill is ideal because
the form encourages children to blow at the pinwheel. The
“stencil” painting of leaves would appear on the digital
canvas when children blow at the windmill. Children can
also rotate the windmill to change the position of the
“paintbrush” (See Fig 1).
Blow Painting is a novel play interaction that enables
children to blow at a toy windmill to create collage
paintings of leaves on a digital canvas. The windmill is
embedded with a microphone (to detect the blowing action)
and a rotation sensor (to detect the blowing direction). Four
kinds of leaves (Red Maple, Sugar Maple, Hickory and
White Oak) are embedded inside transparent RFID sheets
that can be placed under the windmill to provide different
leaf “stencils” for the Blow Paining game.
Author Keywords
Blowing, painting, leaf stencil, tangible object, RFID,
collage, daily experience, children, game, interactive play.
ACM Classification Keywords
B.4.2 Hardware, D.m Software, H.5.2 User Interfaces, J.4
Computer Applications
General Terms
Design, Human Factors
INTRODUCTION
Recently we have seen tangible interfaces developed as an
alternative to the traditional WIMP (window, icon, menu,
pointing device) paradigm in Human-Computer Interaction.
Researchers also investigated using different modalities such
as voice and gesture for interaction design. For example, the
KidsRoom [1] tracks children’s positions and motions to
transform the physical environment into virtual fantasy play
space. People also enjoy interacting with augmented physical
space with their emotions [2] and motions [3]. The I/O Brush
project [4] encourages children to “pick up” colors, textures
and movements in everyday materials by using a digital
paintbrush and drawing with them.
Fig 1: A windmill toy for the Blow Painting game.
The windmill is embedded with a microphone (to detect the
blowing action) and a rotation sensor (to detect the blowing
direction). Four kinds of leaves (Red Maple, Sugar Maple,
Hickory and White Oak) are embedded inside transparent
RFID sheets that can be placed under the windmill to
provide different leaf “stencils” for the Blow Paining
system(See Fig 2 & Fig 3 right).
THE BLOW PAINTING SYSTEM
We have developed a novel game or play interaction called
Blow Painting that enables children to blow at a toy
windmill to create collage paintings of leaves on a digital
canvas. The Blow Painting system is inspired by children’s
love of blowing dandelions or soap bubbles as well as the
natural wind shaped autumn leaf collages. To receive the
Fig 2: Four kinds of leaves for the painting.
The locations of the leaves on the digital canvas are
controlled by the direction of blowing. Children can rotate
the windmill structure clockwise or anti-clockwise to change
the blowing direction¸ and instantly affect the distribution of
the leaves (See Fig 3 left). The opacity of each leaf is decided
by the blowing intensity. The blowing time duration controls
the amount of leaves being painted on the canvas. High
intensity and long duration renders high opacity and more
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
C&C’09, October 26–30, 2009, Berkeley, California, USA.
ACM 978-1-60558-403-4/09/10.
437
amounts of leaves. In addition, children can switch and swap
between painting four kinds of leaves by putting the RFID
embedded leaf stencil sheet (See Fig 3 right) under the toy
windmill. The various parameters for Blow Painting, for
example, the location, amount and opacity for each type of
leaves are controlled by both the blowing actions and the
manipulation of the physical objects, such as blowing to the
pinwheel of the windmill, rotating the windmill, picking up a
leaf stencil sheet and putting it under the windmill.
direction. Some players tried to blow from the side of the
windmill and found that the pinwheel won’t move. They
then discovered that they could rotate the panel in the base
of the windmill structure and change the painting position
of the leaves. Satisfied with the distributions of the leaves
on different locations, the players would then select and
change to other types of leaves. After several changes of
leaf stencils, each player would arrive at a unique leaf
collage of their own (Fig 5 right).
Fig 5: Initial painting (left) & the final outcome (right).
This study showed that a player would need some initial
exploration time to get familiar with the controlling of the
system for intended painting results. However, during the
play testing, all players figured out how to rotate the
windmill, and once they recognized that, they seemed to
have no problem controlling the windmill to reach the
intended orientation and made their paintings. All players
seemed happy and playful when they interacted with the
system. Constant laughs and loud cheering were heard
during the play test session. Many by-standers would make
suggestions about where to put the leaves and which leaf
stencil to choose. Several people waited in line to try out
the system. They all seemed to have fun!
Fig 3 (Left): Rotating toy windmill affects leaves’ position
(Right): RFID is embedded in each leaf stencil sheet.
The collage painting is instantly displayed on the digital
canvas when a child blows at the windmill. In the initial
scene, the canvas shows an image of some footprints and
tree shadows on the snowfield to provide the context of a
real world environment (Fig 4 left). A carefully
orchestrated Blow Painting session would render a beautiful
piece of leaf collage (See Figure 4 right).
In summary, this paper presents an interesting project that
combines a toy (the windmill) to a creative outcome (the
painting of leaves) while using “blowing” as an interaction
technique. The Blow Painting system is built to support an
engaging experiment in play, creativity and tangible
interaction. Future work could extend the system to explore
a variety of themes and more stencil options.
Fig 4: The initial scene (left) & the final scene (right)
The Blow Painting system provides a new tangible interface
to interact with digital information. Through the simple
blowing action, children of all ages and different painting
skills can engage in the process of creating a painting.
Therefore, the Blow Painting system has the potential to
become a fun toy for children and adults alike.
REFERENCES
1. Bobick, A. F., Intille, S. S., et. al (1999) “The KidsRoom:
A Perceptually-Based Interactive and Immersive Story
Environment” in Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual
Environments. Vol. 8 (4) 369-393
2. Colton, S., Valstar, M. F., Pantic, M. (2008) “Emotionally
aware automated portrait painting” in Digital Interactive
Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA '08) 304-311.
BLOW PAINTING STUDY
The Blow Painting system was demonstrated and played by
over a dozen graduate students in the game design class at
Georgia Tech. We found an interesting similarity among all
initial paintings. That is, all players initially only painted
one type of leaves at one X position (See Fig 5 left)! This
interesting phenomenon happened at the initial stage when
all players were testing the Blow Painting system by
blowing at the windmill in one position repeatedly. Once
people realized that all leaves are falling in one vertical
spot, they would then want to change their blowing
3. Hsuan C. L., Shen, Y. T., Jeng, T. S., (2005) “IP++:
Computer augmented Information Portal in Place” in
Computer Aided Architecture Design and Research in
Asia (CAADRIA’ 05). 185-192
4. Ryokai, K., Martin, S., Ishii, H. (2004) “I/O Brush:
Drawing with Everyday Objects as Ink” in ACM Proc.
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