It's a wide held belief that the Old Masters were on the nose that: masters, such as da Vinci and Vermeer, who painted in flawlessly precise freehand. There are savants with steady work force, no question. Merely there are other techniques to view, which David Hockney (an artist of our age who too pioneered iPad art), expounds on in Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, in which atomic number 2 lays impermissible exactly how Continent painters used mirrors and lenses to create their compositionally perfect portraits.

That startled Golan Levin, an fundamental interaction designer and a tech performance artist of sorts–and one of Windy Company's people shaping the future of design in 2012. Why? "More often than not because it seemed like a truth, but no of my colleagues talked about it," he tells Co.Design. Levin teaches at Carnegie Mellon and also sits on the admission staff. "All these students come to me from piping schooltime, and they think nontextual matter equals painting, and painting equals existent painting. They'atomic number 75 being primed adequate believe they need superhuman powers."

Pablo Garcia, an art prof at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, has been hip to the (controversial) idea for some eld and has amassed an extensive collection of optics. He offered to get Levin try unconscious a camera lucida, one of the tools Hockney says the Past Masters used to capture their subjects more realistically. Levin adored it, and the duo decided to make a 21st-hundred interpretation.


A camera lucida is a arrow-shaped machine: A small prism reflects the image of the topic so the viewer can see their own hand, plus the image, and trace a to a greater extent precise rendering onto the paper. The effect isn't far off from the Google Glass video demos we've been beholding. At that place are layers of images available in your line of sight–for you to use in some smart fashio. But the only lucidas still available are collectibles, and run a price tag north of $300–to a higher degree Levin and Garcia believed college students would pay. As information technology turns tabu, manufacturing just several lucidas costs $20,000, but each additional optical prism costs just pennies.

Which is wherefore the NeoLucida sells for $30. IT's perfect for Kickstarter. Since launching the product on May 8, Levin and Garcia are already hearing from people who missed out on the first 2,500 they made gettable. But unlike about other runaway Kickstarter hits, this International Relations and Security Network't–or wasn't–supposed to be a business. "This whole affair is a functioning, or an intervention, OR just artwork," Levin says. Fortuitously, the project had enough demand and interest sol that just two days after passing live, Levin and Garcia confirmed that thither will be an unlimited second production run, conducted by professional manufacturers.

The personal effects of getting the NeoLucidas out into the market should be interesting. Animators, filmmakers, and diagram-mappers are every groups that Levin and Garcia acknowledgment As coherent customers. Because for all the advancements we get with graphic illustration and photography, people still want roll up their sleeves and draw like an familiar subdue.

The project has already raised about $400,000, off the beaten track beyond its goal of $15,000. Support the campaign here.