If you like doodling and wished you could doodle in thin air, then this is your next travel gadget. You don’t need any paper. You can start on a table top surface and draw straight upwards, even at an angle, joining your lines into a pyramid for stability. Or, you can doodle horizontally on a flat surface, then connect your component parts into a lattice-work that you can prop vertically upright.
The Lix pen operates like a 3D printer in that it heats up plastic and pushes it out the nozzle at the nib. You can thus create lines or globules of plastic in 3-dimensional space.
It’s constructed like a high-tech glue gun. You must attach the pen to a USB power source so that it can reach the necessary operating temperature and insert a plastic filament to use as the ‘ink’.
The plastic filaments come in many different colours and two different base elements: one that’s petroleum-based and one that’s plant-based. The former heats at higher speeds, is more durable, but has a plastic smell, while that latter has a sweeter smell, heats at lower temperatures, but can be compromised when it comes in contact with water.
You have to watch the videos, if anything for the unusual artistic take of their director. In the first, we watch a soft-porn, flare-lense homage between man and pen while an airy singer on the cusp of orgasm promises, “We won’t talk about it”, presumably about this illicit love-affair between man and inanimate object.
Then, you have to check out the original Kickstarter video, which has presumably been filmed by a fan of Dario Argento with its mood lighting, glossy horror feel, disjointed wide-eyed people who never look at camera, and voices that seem strangely out of sync with the dialogue, as if this was an Italian slasher movie that’s been re-dubbed by the original artists.
Judging from the comments on Kickstarter, there were a lot of unhappy pledgers who either never received their pen, or waited patiently by the door for news of it as one does a sailor lost at sea.
Thankfully, you don’t have to wait like they did. You can buy direct from Lix.
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