
Show HN: Real-Time Collaborative Watercolor Painting Using Twitch - chrischen
https://www.instapainting.com/twitch-paints
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vdnkh
Neat! I could probably do something similar with my 3D printer, although I'd
make it more friendly - instead of using coordinates (i.e MOVE X0 Y0 Z0) I'd
probably just do something like MOVE LEFT and set it to a fixed amount.

I'd want it to try and steer the commands towards actual creation, so I'd make
a few commands for the printer like MAKE CIRCLE, MAKE SQUARE, MAKE LEFT LINE
etc. and after each command, move the printer up one layer.

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Syrup-tan
I think it'd be cute to keep the absolute coordinate system, however create a
simple web app which lets you point and click where you want it the brush go.
For the Z coordinate, you could have a meter which goes up and down from 0-60
while you hold the mouse, and registers when you let go. (similar to many
mini-game mechanics)

It could be done with the current Twitch stream in maybe 2-3 hours of dev
work, thanks to Twitch using IRC for the chat backend.

Edit: s/coordinate system/absolute coordinate system/ s/but/however/

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nacs
> create a simple web app which lets you point and click where you want it the
> brush go

A lot of the "fun" and challenge from these TwitchPlaysPokemon /
TwitchInstallsLinux type projects comes from using people's typing into Twitch
chat as the only input.

Both of the projects I mentioned earlier would have been much easier with a
custom UI outside of chat also but then it's not really a "TwitchDoesX"
project.

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techninja42
HA! Well, that's hilarious. I was just talking to @eliot at Hackaday supercon
about making this with WaterColorBot and CNCserver at his suggestion, I guess
if it's out there it's out there. Definitely a different setup than I would
have done, but it seems like it might work.

Really though this is just asking for people to write interfaces and use
twitch IRC chat as a terrible API. I'm forced to think that only when it's
unpopular (but popular enough), anything resembling what a user intends will
be created. At least in the end you're guaranteed to get art.

~~~
chrischen
What setup would you do?

Also, I was at hackaday too!

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techninja42
And joshu was too! Talked to him about drawing algos. He's too smart for his
own good ;)

Oh I would probably do something along the lines of adding simple shapes
(Circle x/y & radius, ETC), auto re-inking of last color for long lines... and
who knows what else. I ran out of time to work on it.

~~~
joshu
That sounds ominous.

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abledon
streaming robots doing stuff... seems a big entertainment area in future. I
could see a company that rents out 'teams' of robots/drones or whatever to
subscriber groups and then these groups 'duke it out' or participate in
whatever other contest remotely. The actual dangerous physical elements
happening in some remote desert/warehouse and being streamed to the
users/controllers.

~~~
mikepurvis
There's a group in Waterloo called LabForge who set up actual physical lab
experiments for undergrads to interact with over the internet. I think they
may have pivoted since then, but there's a demo of it on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uveI-8BrZ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uveI-8BrZ4)

I'm with a robotics company, and we've also periodically toyed with setting up
"robot playpen" where you could log in, pay by the hour, and run your
algorithms or whatever on actual hardware. The reality is, though, that for a
lot of the interesting problems in robotics (perception, mapping,
localization), a recorded dataset is more than enough, and for the rest
(controls, guidance), a sufficiently high-fidelity simulation is better for
development anyway.

By the time you've made all those software investments, you probably own
hardware anyway, so the total market for an "AWS of robots" is probably not
really all that large.

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joshu
That was quick. I don't even have my robots back yet!

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chrischen
It was already a week in planning when I told you, but hooking it up to twitch
was relatively trivial.

~~~
joshu
yeah. i definitely thought about doing it with the whiteboard. i got
distracted by the opencv stuff, but i am very happy with the results.

~~~
techninja42
I'd love to implement your work in RoboPaint, might even be able to pull some
color information to make portraits from black sharpie outline with your
implementation and watercolor fill. I've completely failed at any attempts to
make decent raster -> paint vector so far.

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fake-name
Wanna take bets on how long some bored hacker with access to a botnet takes
over and paints dickbutt?

~~~
logfromblammo
I don't know if this already exists as a canonical rule of the Internet or
not, but it seems like it ought to:

The more people involved in the creation of content, the more likely it is to
have dicks somewhere in it.

