Apple’s Pencil is a stylus that’s meant to expand the possibilities of creativity for artists, designers and much more. And now a developer has shown what else the accessory can be used for.
Simon Gladman has put together three new apps utilizing Apple’s Swift, all of which are meant to showcase the power of the Apple Pencil, and all of which have nothing to do with drawing or painting. As reported by MacRumors, Gladman has shown that the Apple Pencil can be used as a 3D image editing controller, a weight scale, and even a synthesizer.
- PencilController
The first app, is an experiment to use the Apple Pencil as an editing controller within the custom app, which is meant to adjust the fine setting of parameters on Core Image filters. There are three image filtering modes to work with:
- Hue/Saturation – Apple Pencil’s azimuth angle controls hue and its altitude angle controls the saturation
- Brightness/Contrast – Apple Pencil’s altitude angle along North/South controls contrast and the angle along West/East controls brightness
- Gamma/Exposure – Apple Pencil’s altitude angle along North/South controls exposure and the angle along West/East controls gamma
There’s a bit of functionality to take note of, though, with the app, as Gladman says, “the app uses a spring loaded pattern, so the user needs to hold down one of the mode keys in the bottom left of the screen to stay in the filtering mode.”
You can watch it in action just below.
PencilScale
The next app is PencilScale, and does exactly what the name implies: Utilizes the technology within the Apple Pencil to work as a weight scale. The video shows that the Pencil works well enough in this regard, as it is very sensitive, but the results aren’t as accurate as one would want when actually using a scale.
According to the original report, the Pencil works as a scale by subtracting the touch’s force from a base weight, which, according to Gladman, is “set as the current touch force when the ‘zero’ button is pressed.” After that, the number is multiplied by 140 to aim for an estimated weight in grams.
Check it out below:
PencilSynth
Finally, there’s PencilSynth, which is an AudioKit-powered synthesizer. The Apple Pencil comes into play by adjusting the position and orientation of the accessory to control certain aspects of the app’s core features:
- Apple Pencil’s horizontal position on the screen controls frequency
- Apple Pencil’s vertical position on the screen controls the modulating multiplier
- Apple Pencil’s altitude angle controls the carrier multiplier
- Apple Pencil’s azimuth angle controls the modulation index
And here it is in action:
The source code for all three of these experimental apps is available on GitHub, for those that want to try it out.
What do you think of the ideas? Is this something you think Apple will expand on in the future?
[via MacRumors]
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