Make light paintings on your iPhone with this amazing app
Light paintings are a fun technique, dating back to the 19th century and used by luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol. By waving a light source, like a flashlight, in front of a camera set for a long exposure, you can seemingly create static paintings of light in mid air.
Your iPhone is both a camera and a flashlight, but you usually need two of them to make a light painting. Now a new web app called Air Pencil is set to change that, allowing you to create incredible three-dimensional light paintings, no external camera required.
Here’s how it works. The Air Pencil app uses the accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope in your iPhone to figure out how it’s being moved in the air, then turns that into a digital light painting within your phone. Once the app is launched, you just hold anywhere on the screen to put the tip of your Air Pencil “down” and start recording your light painting movements. You can then move around and through the 3-D sculpture before sharing it online or (eventually) 3-D printing the design. It’s pretty cool to watch happen. Nols Forsblom, CEO and founder of Adtile Technologies (which makes Air Pencil), says inspiration came from “Picasso, [Alexander] Calder, James Turrell, Mark Rothko, Anish Kapoor, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel and more,” adding, “When you get down to it, art is about taking something technologically and emotionally complex and turning it into something simple, functional, and beautiful.”Sadly, the Air Pencil isn’t available for everyone to try just yet. You can sign up to be a possible beta tester
