In the case of a wall-painting app, I might use a quasimode.
Sounds good. Maybe I'll try it.
That way people still get the satisfaction of having generated something without the wobbliness-potential of freehand drawing.
Makes sense, though I think in this case I would rather be able to draw anything (a rainbow, for example) even if it doesn't look the best (wobbliness is because of my skills, not because of an inherently wobbly and feedback-free laser) than to have a limited palette of nice given shapes. Although I could imagine somehow "imprinting" physical shapes onto the wall rather than using virtual ones.
For example, hold up the physical triangular prism and its outline is shown projected on the wall. Hit "freeze" and it stays stuck on the wall, kind of like Paula's TinkerCad.
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It definitely seems like there's something satisfying about painting on huge surfaces.
My rainbow app started as an intuition that kids would find it fun to paint all over something big, like the walls of their house. I suspect that there's something neat about being able to reach and affect things that are usually out-of-reach—this happens all the time for kids (young ones especially), and even happens for adults as we see in GRL's project and our own spatial media experiments. It reminds me of something I think Claire Latané said in
her Indiecade talk about playgrounds, that the feeling of control[0] over your environment seems important for children growing up. Of course, it's probably also important for adults, but we don't really think about it. Hopefully spatial media will let us start exploring that.
–glen
[0] It's easy to go too far and dominate your environment. c.f. climate change, fragile western agricultural practices described in Seeing Like a State