Technology is constantly evolving and changing the way we interact with things, and even with each other. Every year we see major technological advancements in a huge range of different fields. Most notably would be the technology updates we see in the mobile phone industry, gaming and computers industry, and television and other visual and audio devices – these devices are updated every year, with bigger and better features than the previous years
One area which you might not expect to see technology making improvements in is graffiti, but, low and behold, technology has in fact hit this area and produced a new, clean way to graffiti – using digital graffiti.
Basically the digital graffiti system is a huge screen, which is connected to a laptop computer running the appropriate software, and uses a digital spray can with IR tracking. When the button is pressed on the spray can, the laptop computer software tracks the position of the can and draws the appropriate pattern on screen (the featured image at the top of this post was drawn on a digital graffiti screen!).
It looks like a really fun way to be creative. At the moment these screens aren’t really available for the home consumer. You can rent them for special events, and you’ll often find them being used at large corporate events and promotions – companies like Google have even made use of these at events they host and attend. And if you’re big on TV, you might even of noticed one of these screens being used on the Ellen show not too long ago!
Take a look at these videos to get a better idea of how these screens work, and to see some samples of what you can do with them:
Air Graffiti – Visual Graffiti Wall Hired for Bar Mitzvah:
IAAPA 2012 – AIR Graffiti:
AIR Graffiti v1 alpha Test 2 @ Home:
As you can see, it looks like fun! I’m not sure on how much they cost to rent, but it would be great to have something like this on a much smaller scale which we could buy for use at home – like to use with a personal desktop computer, or a laptop computer. All it would require is the appropriate software, a USB powered spray can, and of course your laptop or desktop computer. Granted, there wouldn’t be as big of a canvas as you get with the huge interactive screen like you saw above, but it would still be really cool to play around with on the TV or PC monitor. If you had your own projection screen connected to a PC or laptop, then you could even connect up to that and have a huge canvas to work with!
Hopefully it won’t take long before we see something like this for the home consumer market!
