The idea is that you can use this pen to point at any object in the world, the pen then ‘extracts’ the colour, and then is able to write in that colour using a mixture of RGB inks that it contains.
Unfortunately, it’s just a concept, designed by Jinsu Park.
As far as I know there are no practical implementations of this interesting idea. One could make a strong argument that the pen should use CMY (or even red, yellow and blue) primaries since RGB primaries would result in a tiny colour gamut and wouldn’t allow the pen to reproduce any real colours at all. See http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/what-is-a-colour-primary/
Reblogged this on The Secret Life of Yarn and commented:
I WANT THIS TO BE REAL. Please, please let this be real! This would be SO useful for designing! The next step in the design process for a Fair Isle project I’m working on is to find colored pencil equivalents for all of the yarn colors I want to use in the design so I can start testing color patterns. With this pen all I would have to do is point it at the yarn I want to use and start drawing. It’s the One Pen to Rule Them All. This post said it was still just a concept, but that was 3 years ago…perhaps it’s closer to being a reality now?