You paint, we paint, Eye Paint!
Collage in app land
Eye Paint is an augmented reality coloring app in which users are invited to use colors and textures in their environment to color in black and white sketches. More precisely, it is a coloring and collage app, as users can place and layer environmental samples in whatever way they see fit in this app.
Created by Curious Hat, this coloring toy is an entertaining way to get kids of all ages creatively interacting with their environment. Users must use their environment to color in pictures. There are no built-in colors; everything used to complete the black and white pre-loaded images has to come from the real world.
The best thing about this app is that it inspires looking at the world from a different perspective, seeing things not as they are but as other things to be sampled and remixed at will. Parents can definitely help children figure out what to color and with what objects in the room. It can also be turned into an interactive game where players have to figure out what was used to create certain parts of a picture.
I hyperbolically referred to “kids of all ages” above, but the app is really rated as appropriate for ages 4+. It is likely that only the more advanced four year-olds will really start to use the app to its full potential. My three year-old just was not interested in this particular app, and while it is certainly useful for developing creativity, at this stage in my child’s development, I’d rather just get my son some paper and crayons and let him go to town.
There isn’t a lot of in-app instruction, so it can be difficult to figure out how to use the game (especially for the younger kids). Also, you really need to want to use it to find it engaging. What you can color seems overly dictated by the app until you figure out how to have fun with it.
Eye Paint is not available on Android, but can be played on all i-devices. Additionally, although the app is free, there are additional purchases that can be made to upgrade the experience. All it takes is a three second hold of a button to access the purchase area in the Apple app store. This is not really enough to keep older kids from charging up your account.
Overall, the free version of the app is of average quality: The drawings are cute, but not that endearing. However, you can purchase additional art packs with better images. It would be nice to have increased difficulty levels for more advanced users, but this is fine for young kids without a lot of hand-eye coordination.
Personally, I much prefer Curious Hat’s other app: Playground, which combines the creativity of Eye Paint with educational exercises.
