Art in Motion for iPad Review

Art in Motion is hard to categorize outside of calling it a "toy." The term "game" simply doesn't fit it, as there is no goal to achieve and nothing particularly standing in your way, and "application" makes it sound like something best suited for a day at the office. No, Art in Motion is a toy - something to play with a bit, then put away until the mood strikes to play with it again.

Art in Motion allows users to create scenes using colored orbs. Almost every facet of the presentation of these orbs has a user interface control: make your orbs large or small, make them move quickly or slowly, make them respond to gravity or not, or give them odd capabilities like bizarre amounts of friction or the tendency to explode when they intersect one another. It's like a fully-customizable Lite Brite for the touch generation.

If you're looking for more than this, I'm afraid you're looking at the wrong app. Art in Motion has many, many ways to customize your creation, but in the end you are manipulating a variety of orbs on the screen and watching the rules you impose on this virtual world come to life. You can save your creations to watch again, but I'm not certain why you would want to do this. It seems to me that the value of an app like Art in Motion is in its inherently fleeting nature. You create something wonderful, only to see it evaporate on your screen.

In many ways, Art in Motion reminds me of the sort of application that proliferated when early color Macs came out - not particularly useful in any way, but eye-catching tech demos for those interested in new technology. I imagine handing my iPad over to a friend and showing him Art in Motion. It's captivating, certainly, but for how long?