Composite is an excellent iPad 2 app that lets you “remix your surroundings”, painting with the world around you.
Touch a button and it shows you a video view through your iPad’s camera, superimposed on a kind of electronic canvas. Swipe your finger lazily over the video feed and it gets painted in.
You can change the brightness and contrast, mess with the color settings, edit your brush stroke thickness and style, and paint images on top of images.
The results are striking, combining the visual effect of a painting with the immediacy of a photograph. Making a Composite image real does feel like painting with video, and turns out to be a good way of portraying the feel of a place or the atmosphere of an event.
Here’s a video that explains it a bit more:
Composite from James Alliban on Vimeo.
Developer James Alliban (who says he was inspired by the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg) has posted a few example works on Flickr, and says he’s keen to see what other people make using Composite. I’m quite looking forward to them, too.
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