Fine art is often very expensive to buy for your home and very few people are artists in their own right. Still, many of us love art and crave its presence in our daily lives. Some of us may print out poor imitations of the original piece or tape up pictures from magazines on our walls. Now, a startup called Electric Objects has launched an successfully funded a Kickstarter project for a digital canvas picture frame.
The device, called the EO1, is essentially a display that you can hang on your wall or stand on a shelf, desk, or table, which shows off digital art. Once you’ve connected your EO1 to Wi-Fi and downloaded the Electric Objects app, you can send digital images of fine art, photography, and pretty much any other digital image, including GIFS, to the device for display. The EO1 will then show the image and adjust to lighting conditions to optimize the display, so that it best showcases the image at any time of day or night.
The EO1’s display measures 23-inches diagonally and has a matte finish with lots of anti-glare protection, so your digital art stays vibrant and visible. Direct sunlight may lessen the image quality slightly, but the EO1 should perform much better than most displays when they’re hit by the sun. The IPS LCD display has a resolution of 1920 x 1280 pixels, 50M:1 Mega dynamic contrast ratio and 250 cd/m2 brightness. The frame around the display is thin, which maximizes the amount of screen real estate. The frame comes in black, white, and wood, but the wood version comes in limited numbers.
Underneath it all, Electric Objects kept the hardware as basic as possible. The display is powered by a 1GHz dual-core ARM A6 processor and 1GB of RAM. It also has 2GB of flash memory.
You can decide which image you want to display on the EO1, using the iOS or Android app. The digital frame can display still images, GIFs, and digital art made with WebGL, Processing, and most major Javascript drawing library content. Most digital frames can only get new content via cords or SD cards, which is often difficult or annoying. With the app, it’s easy to send the image of your choosing directly to the Eo1 frame.
Even though the display is always on, Electric Objects says that it’s very low-energy and actually only consumes the same amount of power as the average light bulb. When you need to charge your EO1, just plug it in the wall, like you would any laptop or tablet.
Right now, Electric Objects has special partnerships with the New York Public Library, Behance, Giphy, Musuem Of The Moving Image, Digg, and To.Be, all of which provide access to huge libraries of art images.
Fine artists including Nicolas Sassoon, Casey Reas, Sara Ludy, Yoshi Sodeoka, Pasquale D’Silva, Erica Gorochow, and Patrick Moberg are working with Electric Objects to create art for the frame and the company plans to offer an artist in residence program for those who are interested in sharing their art digitally via the EO1 frame.
Electric Objects is offering a big discount on EO1 frames to those who order early from the Kickstarter campaign. If you pledge $300, you can get the EO1 in your choice of white or black along with the stand. Normally, the EO1 will cost $500. Electric Objects plans to ship the Eo1 frames by May 2015, but those who want to be part of the beta testing can get one as soon as January 2015.
Even though the price may sound a little steep, in comparison with an original by even a relatively unknown artist, it’s a bargain. The EO1 frame also offers the advantage of nearly unlimited variety. You can change your art daily if you so choose, so you’ll never get sick of the painting on your wall.
