Paint like Pollock. Mobile app by FIT BUT students awakens the inner artist in children and adults

Brushes, paints, palette, canvas - all these are usually considered basic necessities for artistic expression. Designed for all art lovers, regardless of age, the Pollock Artify app offers the opportunity to unleash your creativity with a tool that is always at hand - your mobile phone. Its movements are transformed into brush movements on the canvas in the style of American abstract painter Jackson Pollock.  It was created by four students of the Faculty of Information Technology, Peter Zdravecký, Slavomír Svorada, Jakub Zaukolec and Jozef Čásar. 

The idea to connect the world of aesthetics and technology came from a reflection on human values. "In addition to the basic needs in life, humans need to perceive aesthetic values, which include art. Pollock Artify allows you to create your own art and share it with others," explains Peter Zdravecký, one of the members of the implementation team. 

I have a mobile phone, so I create


In today's highly technological age, there is a plethora of apps with the aim of making life easier for their users. The main inspiration for this app was the gyroscope, which can record the movement of a device in space. What remained to be figured out was how to convert this movement into brushstrokes, thus enabling drawing on the canvas. This was because there was no interface that could convert the gyroscope data into something that could be used, such as a 2D cursor. It was therefore necessary to come up with a custom approach that would record the movement of the device and turn it into brush movement. The app now works simply by saying that as you tilt, rotate and pan the mobile phone, its movements are transformed into the movement of the brush across a virtual canvas, creating a Jackson Pollock-style painting on it. 



From idea to realization in one semester


The project was completed as part of the TAMa - Mobile App Development course and was created in one semester. The development itself took approximately two weeks. The rest of the time was spent testing bug fixes and publishing to Google Play. In addition to having to come up with a solution to convert mobile movements into brush strokes, the development of the app faced another complication. "A big issue was the high performance required for the app, as it has to record the device movement and convert it into real-time brush movement for a smooth image. This is an area where the app needs improvements in the future to make it usable on older devices and to avoid the app getting stuck or crashing," adds Peter Zdravecky. Although the students still have some work to do on the app, they can already feel good about bringing a little more creativity and colour back into people's lives.