I never thought I’d write so many trendy words in one title. Those words describe something that I think is über innovative and cool. Graffiti has been done by spray cans, light and even water and cleaning chemicals, but I don’t ever think I have seen graffiti done by a robot shooting paintball bullets before. At least not a robot doing it. That’s just why this thing is so exciting (spoken from the geek within me).
Benjamin Gaulon, the mastermind behind the project, has created this terminator precision master gadget and dubbed it “PrintBall“. This is a robot that shoots paintballs after a pattern carefully entered into a computer driven software. The precision is so exact that Benjamin even asked one of his buddies to stand in front of it so that the robot could fire those paint filled balls straight at him. Of course, he didn’t hit him or even nudge him. The precision is so exact that the paint almost didn’t touch his clothes, barely creating a humanoid pattern around him.
To explain it would be to wreck and completely exhaust my vocabulary so I will just put it in Mr. Gaulon’s own words:
Benjamin Gaulon – “The PrintBall is a graffiti Robot. It works like a giant Ink-Jet printer using a PaintBall Gun as print-head. The PaintBall gun is mounted on a custom made pan & tilt unit, which is connected to a software programmed with Max/Msp: PrintWare 6.0 (G.M.L compatible).
The pan & tilt is controlled by an Atmel chip [programmed in Basic] allowing the PrintWare 6.0 software to move the two stepper motors and to trigger the PaintBall Gun. The software allows the users to load, analyse and shot images. The resolution of the image can be adjusted according to the number of steps between each points.
Using the Graffiti Markup Language (GML) the PrintBall, a Graffiti Robot made of a PaintBall Gun and a custom made Pan&Tilt Unit controlled by a Max/Msp based software, was able to shot a Graffiti created by TEMPT on the EyeWriter.”
There you have it. Pretty simple huh? The robot is every geek’s dream and if made mobile, this thing could change paintball games forever. What’s next? Android paintball enemies driving mobile and computer controlled paintball tanks? I guess Mr. Gaulon will have to ponder that one for a few more days…
