UTILITY_ Are you tired of not being able to interact with beautiful colors from the world around you? SwatchMate set out to design a simple and accurate way to capture moments of color inspiration: the Cube. The Cube is the simplest way to capture color and record color inspiration on your smartphone or computer. It is a portable device that captures the color of any surface. Using Bluetooth, it sends the color data to your smartphone or directly into Photoshop.
Designers and artists love and work with color. But we also wanted to make something for the little creative inside all of us. Never miss another moment of inspiration again.
The Cube is great for:
- Bringing real-world color straight into Photoshop
- Matching color to paint brands, right there in the app*
- Color-grading photographs based on actual color readings
- Easy spot checks to ensure color consistency
- Helping fashion designers coordinate colorful textiles
- Ensuring that digital color assets pop when printed in the real world
"We designed the Cube to be small, beautiful and easy to use. We also packed it full of features."
Using Bluetooth Low Energy, the Cube records color information on a paired iOS or Android smartphone. Relive moments of inspiration by organising your captured colors in categories.
Inside the Cube there is (surprisingly!) a sphere. The sphere contains a light source and a color sensor, and has a small sample hole through which to capture color. A controlled sequence of light is shone on the surface, before being redirected back into the sphere toward the color sensor:
The Cube’s integrating sphere captures all color information. This lets the Cube capture the color of virtually anything, regardless of surface sheen.
The Cube’s open ColorAPI makes it easy for developers and hackers to build all sorts of amazing color applications. The Cube can output colors in the RGB, CMYK and L*a*b* color spaces.
After winning several university awards for early prototypes, we went through countless design and engineering iterations driven by our focus on accuracy, simplicity and cost.
We’ve spent the last two years building the technology that powers the Cube.
Initial bare-bones prototypes served as learning platforms for our color detection algorithms. Later prototypes improved the usability and aesthetics of our device.
By the start of 2013, we’d done enough to get accepted into the Melbourne Accelerator Program.
The Cube is now a final prototype. Bluetooth enabled, it pairs wirelessly to iOS and Android devices and outputs surface colors. We’ve also created an Adobe Photoshop extension that automatically changes the primary color based on new color samples taken by the Cube.
SwatchMate is an Australian product development studio based out of Melbourne. Started by three university friends who studied Electronics together, we couldn’t be happier to grow our SwatchMate family to include the Kickstarter family.
Co-founders Paul Peng, Djordje Dikic & Rocky Liang
The Cube by SwatchMate on Kickstarter
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