Brainstorming: Digital Marble Painting

Remember that classic preschool art project where they give you a paper plate with paint-covered marbles and you roll them around and create cool abstract looking art? You know, the kind of art that you see in the museum and think, "wow, a preschooler could do that."

Well, imagine doing that but with tons more possibilities, because your artwork is on a digital canvas that can be customized and adjusted in so many different ways. And most importantly, you can say you made it using a computer application instead of a paper plate, so you'll be seen as more credible to art critics.

Consider being able to dynamically change your paint color, add effects or animations, or add more marbles to your artwork at any given moment. Well, this is my next brainstorming idea: a marble painting game that is controlled by a tiltable controller. 

The minute I saw that my Arduino kit came with an 3 axis accelerometer, I got pretty stoked and started thinking of ways to use it. The controller would be designed to mimic a stereotypical artist's paint palette that the user tilts around in order to control their "marble" that's rolling around on a digital canvas produced by a processing application. 

The accelerometer detects the angle at which the player is tilting the palette, and the marble will react and travel in the appropriate direction. Several buttons on the palette will allow the user to customize their artwork. For instance, one button could cycle through different colors, another could add more marbles with every press, and a third could cycle through random effects and brush styles.

Wow. Such art

Source: artfulparent.com

Reading and fine tuning the accelerometer input may be a challenging task. It's also worthy to consider the behavior of a rolling marble paint ball in order to emulate it digitally. First, the speed of the marble affects the thickness of the line that is created; a faster marble creates a thinner line, and vice-versa. So when drawing the line, we would need to make it correspond to its current speed.

Second is the behavior of rolling the marble ball over already-painted surfaces. Creating that "smear" effect may pose a bit of a challenge coding-wise. A possible solution would be having the marble thicken the existing lines that its travelling over. It could also possibly draw additional pixels of the existing color underneath in the same direction its rolling. Sounds a bit tricky, but it's probably doable.

Anyway, I think this game would bring people back to their childhood and making these fun little marble paintings. I also think the indirect control of tilting the canvas itself makes things a little more unpredictable, so they're a lot more fun. Plus, combining those elements and implementing them in a digital application adds way more possibilities than just using paint and a paper plate.