Tag: Red hill studios »

It was Earth Day this past Sunday, so what better time to check out the second in the Painting with Time app series: Climate Change. The app has 17 pre-set images of geographical regions that have been severely impacted by global warming. If one has any reservations about the veracity of Earth’s rising temperatures going in, toying with this app should lay them to rest.

Each image first appears as a tracing. Users then pick one of eight brushes or pre-cut segments, but instead of painting with tubes of color, we brush on the effects of time. The consequences are jaw dropping. The app uses high quality photographs of each locale from two time periods. Some are decades apart, others like the Mississippi River only a year. Users can uncover the overlapping views one at a time by filling in the canvas quickly with broad strokes to compare, or get creative and paint or break up the image artfully. Each photo comes with information on the region and the impact climate change is having there. There is even a multi-media presentation on the issue in general.

For those who don’t want to be lectured, and prefer to see evidence with their own eyes, Painting with Time: Climate Change  is perfect. For believers and even activists, it provides a useful teaching and display tool.

The passage of time is rather hard for one to notice while it’s happening. Seasons change gradually, climate change creeps at such a slow pace many actively deny its reality – even changes to a person we are close to are hard to perceive when we see them daily. Red Hill Studios, best known for educational and health games and behind the documentary “Exploring Time", have launched an iPad app. Painting With Time, the gives users 14 remarkable environments to explore the concept and its impact.

In the gallery are pastoral scenes, urban landscapes, even people, and we are invited by the simple GUI, to select a scene and then use a finger to paint it. The tubes in this app, however, don’t contain paint - they contain time. In minutes, days, seasons, or years users blend the effects of time right onto the image and then slice it in myriad ways to explore the juxtapositions. It's time-lapse photography with an interactive twist.

The results can be beautiful like seasons changing in a forest, amusing like playing with facial hair growth, and some are eye-opening like the glacier retreat in the arctic. Painting With Time is an aesthetic, creative, and mind-expanding app, ideally suited to starting a new year, and it’s free.