Osmo keeps it magical with new drawing app

Osmo has done it again: The iPad-based game platform expanded into a whole new area of creativity with a new drawing app dubbed Masterpiece Thursday. The app, which is free for owners of the Osmo hardware, makes it possible to trace pictures displayed on your iPad on a real piece of paper — kind of like a 21st century version of an overhead projector, if you will.

Check out the video to get an idea of how it actually works — as with previous Osmo games, it’s kind of something you need to see:

Masterpiece users can either snap a picture to trace, use a simple web search to access an endless catalog of images, or even combine both to a special kind of mash-up.

Osmo was one of my favorite products of 2014, and I also really liked this new Masterpiece app when I got a demo of it earlier this month. It’s again a very simple idea, based on something every child already likes to do, taken to the next level with smart and unorthodox use of technology.

There were a few aspects of Masterpiece that I was unsure about when first hearing about it. One is its educational value. As a child of educators with strong convictions, I was told at an early age that coloring books are bad. Supposedly, they were stifling creativity, teaching you to conform and stay between the lines, as opposed to develop your own ideas.

Thirty-some years later, as a parent of two, I’ve relaxed my views about this, because I’ve come to understand coloring as soothing and fun. Still, I had that nagging question int he back of my head: What if Masterpiece teaches the wrong ideals of perfection, and inhibits creative expression?

I asked Pramod Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Osmo maker Tangible Play about this, and his response was interesting. Research has shown, he told me, that all childrenlike to draw — up until about third grade. That’s when many of them get the sense that their aspirations are bigger than their abilities. The things they draw just don’t look like the things they want to draw. So they give up. Masterpiece, he argued, can help children keep their confidence, and keep them drawing.

Osmo co-founder Jerome Scholler did this silly little video to get me excited about Masterpiece. He’s clearly a lot better at this than I was during my first attempt.

The other question I had after watching the video was: isn’t there a big cognitive disconnect? When you draw a regular picture, your eyes focus on the paper in front of you. When you use a drawing app like Paper, you look and draw on the screen. With Masterpiece, you look on the screen while drawing on paper. Isn’t that terribly confusing?

There was a bit of a learning curve when I got to try the app, and my first drawing looked a little like I’ve had way too much coffee (which I probably did). But even from just trying it once, I got the sense that this may be a lot easier than it looks. Essentially, any pen you use with Masterpiece becomes a pointer device, much like a mouse. Except, it’s also still a pen, helping you to draw a picture on real paper.

While developing Masterpiece, the Osmo team came to a really interesting conclusion, Sharma told me: “Everything can be a mouse,” he said. That’s a pretty powerful concept, because it breaks with the expectations we have towards interacting technology. The iPad suddenly isn’t just about using your fingers to manipulate objects on screen anymore. Instead, the world starts to become your interface as well as your canvas. I can’t wait to find where Osmo is going to go next with this.