Online Drawing Collab
The link to “Open Studio” by Andy Deck on Whitney Artport was broken but it still existed somewhere in google. Here is the link
As I listed the Uniqlo campaign website Uniqlo Grid as one of my inspirations in my introduction, I’m attracted by something about “realtime visual collaboration on the web”.
OpenStudio project launched in 1990 according to Whitney artport archive. Andy Deck has a website where he posts all his experimental works using fundamental functions of hypertext and pixelerate images from 1990 to the present. Here is another similar project by him launched in 2002 (Collabyrinth) in which users create their own desktop icons.
These two sites have similarities in terms of interactivity among the participants. Both have “record” “save” “open” functions that let one person saves and stores a piece and then others can share it overtime from the archive.
I thought that the chat function in OpenStudio was sort of funny, because chatting with someone while drawing together online is little awkward. Unfortunately, I did not have anyone online with me at that moment but I could imagine it would be possibly like, “Hey let’s draw this!” or “how’s that!”…? Our drawing plug-in to a chat application like msn is not quite realtime in terms of drawing collaboration.
I can say that the regulation of space shared with multiple participants is a key to this type of online drawing collaboration system. What’s common between OpenStudio and UniqloGrid is there is only one canvas to be drawn onto.
Another question to be asked when creating online drawing collaboration is realtime vs. overtime. Through my experience with UniqloGrid in which I intensely competed with another participant for about 15 min, I found the realtime online drawing battle pretty intense and energy consuming. It’s because the speed of interaction has to be instant to convey my strategy otherwise the connection between me and him/her is lost. At that point, game is over. In overtime collaboration, such as saving a file and opening somebody else’s work to draw onto, one may finish a piece with satisfaction however it loses the spark of instance interaction.
Originally by Akiko Rokube from Major Studio Interactivity on March 17, 2008, 1:51am
