Would you like Vincent Van Gogh to paint your portrait?
The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said yesterday that it developed a digital painting technology that can incorporate brush strokes that have a “human” touch. Maybe not the same as the famed painter, but as close to a real painting as a digital image gets.
The state-run institute said it used “non-photorealistic rendering,” a method of visual expression used in computer graphics. Unlike graphic software tools like Photoshop, this technology applies digital paint stroke by stroke, as a human painter would. A portrait takes 20 seconds to “draw” on a digital “canvas.”
The technology will be exhibited at the Guerilla Studio of Siggraph 2006 starting Monday in Boston, where visitors can have their portraits drawn by the computer and printed out on the spot. The computer graphics convention and exhibition takes place every year and is the largest of its kind in the world. The Guerilla Studio is an exhibition that fuses emerging technology in an art gallery format.
“We plan to commercialize the computer graphics technology for use in animation or films later this year and develop other drawing techniques, such as cartoons or pen and ink. We have also filed for two international patents,” said researcher Koo Bon-gi.by Wohn Dong-hee