Have you heard of Living Ink yet?
My last post talked about an envisioning video that shows how we may use technology 10 years into the future. Turns out, not all of the technology concepts are that far away. In fact, one of the interesting technology innovations is already here: It’s called Living Ink.
Remember the very first scene in the actual envisioning video where the kids draw a dog and a ball on a collaborative display surface, and then “throw” the ball and the dog comes to life and chases it (about the 15:00 minute mark in the embedded video)?
We don’t have the collaborative display wall (darn!), but my kids have been making their drawings come to life at home since they got ItzaBitza for Christmas. It’s quite amazing, actually.
The kids draw scenes on the computer screen, and characters called sketchies interact with the drawings. Draw a door, and a sketchy can walk through it. Draw a tree, and it may start growing fruit. The sketchies help guide kids through the game to different scenes. Sometimes they’ll ask players to draw something specific, like a house. At other times, kids are free to explore the scenes by pursuing quests built into the game.
As an added bonus, ItzaBitza helps my three-year old son learn how to read… but even my 7 year old daughter, who can already read, enjoys playing because it’s so exciting to her to see her artistic creations come to life.
BTW, we use ItzaBitza at home on a tablet PC to make the drawing experience as “natural” as possible, but you can play using a regular PC as well, just drawing with the mouse, and it’s still fun. I think our next PC will be a large touch screen to take advantage of Windows 7’s built in multi-touch capabilities, so that should open up the screen real-estate for an even more immersive ItzaBitza drawing experience.
ItzaBitza is a made by a children’s software startup called Sabi, which was founded in partnership with Microsoft’s IP Ventures Program. It costs about $20. Well worth the money, IMO, but also, check out what USA Today had to say.
John Mullinax is a Platform Strategy Advisor with Microsoft's DPE Team. Before joining Microsoft in 2006, John held a vartiety of positions at Ford Motor Company, most recently leading IT services strategy to support explosive business growth in China. Other positions included: Enterprise Architect, Application Portfolio Management, Technology Governance, and Product Manager. Prior to joining Ford, John earned his MBA at the University of Washington. Before that, he was Director of Elections for Douglas County, Washington, where he conducted the first Federal mail-ballot election in the USA. Subsequently, he joined the Secretary of State's office as a consultant working with county election officials in Washington state to improve operational effectiveness, integrity, and security (aka, to prevent the kind of debacle we saw in Florida in 2000).
