Paint chat

A paint chat is an online chat room that allow its participants to draw together in real-time while they chat. The chat box is usually at the bottom, with the drawing area on top. Paint chats generally attract the same demographics as Oekakis. Anime characters are a popular subject. Paint chat is not an association of websites.

Applications

Browser based

CoSketch^[1]

CoSketch is a HTML5-based whiteboard website, offering intuitive and minimalistic GUI for multi-player sessions. A user can invite others to his/her CoSketch session (called "room") by providing the unique hyperlink to the session and/or a unique hyperlink to the saved sketch. Ten minutes after all users have closed their browser windows running the session, the session's content is deleted if it is not saved before.^[2]

Drawball^[3]

Drawball is a Flash-based website that hosts a large circular canvas on which visitors can collaboratively draw in real time using a limited quantity of virtual ink. The site requires no registration. The website identifies users based on their IP address, allowing each a certain amount of ink to be used. The ink accumulates over time. On the side of the canvas is a group chat accessible without login for anyone.

Drawsum^[4]

Drawsum is a huge collaborative drawing application where anyone can draw onto a massive shared canvas. The website is built using Java. There is only one canvas and everyone shares it to make one collective artwork, allowing for both collaboration on a drawing or doodling in a corner. It is completely free and uncensored.

Scriblink^[5]

An online whiteboard with real-time collaboration. The site is built using Java and requires no registration. Logging onto the site automatically connects users to their own private whiteboard and other features. Also allows embedding in web pages. It has some support for mathematics (via LaTeX).

Groupboard^[6]

Based on a multi-user drawing/chat Java applet that was developed for the Etchinghill Studios website in March 1997. The applet was further developed so that multiple whiteboard and chat sessions could be hosted on the same server, and in 1998 it was released as Groupboard. Since then over 90,000 people have set up their own Groupboard.

PaintChatApp(or just Paintchat)^[7]

A closed-source freeware website, and consists of a server and client applet written in Java. It was originally developed in 2000 by Japanese programmer Shi-chan. The last version released in 2003, and has enjoyed significant popularity.

RateMyDrawings DrawChat^[8]

Part of the "RateMyDrawings" community that allows people to draw and chat at the same time using a Flash based drawing tool.

Twiddla^[9]

A browser-based paint chat tool with voice support (requires Java) and a focus towards hosting web meetings. It has been live since April 2007.

Draw My Thing^[10]

A game made by OMGPOP.com. Similar to Pictionary, the game features public rooms in which you have a 60-second time limit to draw a given word or phrase in a turn-based format. The other players must use chat to guess the object. If guessed correctly, the guesser gets two points and the artist gets one. The length of each match varies based on the number of players (1-7 players and 3-1 rounds) and does not require an account. The game has spawned the successful mobile app Draw Something.

Draw online^[11]

An online drawing game.

iSketch

iSketch is a web based competitive drawing game.

Queeky MultiDraw^[12]

Part of the Queeky online drawing tools, it enables collaborative multi-user drawing in real time. Each user can create an own paint chat room and invite friends to collaborate on it. Finished drawings can be saved to Queeky's art gallery.

Sketcher^[13]

A multi-user Java system with realistic brushes, created by Jotun Technologies Inc. There are free, public rooms on ArtGrounds.com.^[14]

iScribble^[15]

Similar to PaintChat, although it requires registration. It can have both public and private boards.

WhiteBoard^[16]

A multi-user whiteboard and chat. This is a web application utilizing the HTML5 specification. As the result, it does not require any plug-ins or add-ons and works directly in the browsers supporting this technology. Created by MegaScopes.com.

Non-browser

openCanvas

openCanvas is a Japanese image editing program whose old freeware versions featured network support. One user could host a session and the program would accept up to 3 other users via incoming TCP connections. None of these features exist in openCanvas 2.x and later. Copies of oC11b72.exe (openCanvas 1.1b72) remain in wide circulation on the Internet because of this.

PictoChat

Nintendo's PictoChat software, built into Nintendo DS firmware, operates over a local-area wireless network. It does not connect to the Internet.

Collab^[17]

Collab (software) is an open source, multi-platform paint chat program written in Java. It runs also via JWS, so it doesn't need to be installed. Users can connect one of public servers or host own server instance directly from application. Collab has features as room locking, layers, several painting tools (for example brushes or LaTeX math), room snapshot accessible via HTTP (by web browsers).

Paint Chat^[18]

A real-time drawing chat application that runs using Instant Messaging.^[19]

Two remote users can communicate using drawings on their Android -based smartphones. Currently supports for GTalk.^[20]

Drawpile^[21][22]

An open source, cross-platform sketching-oriented drawing program similar with a multi-user, resizable canvas, supporting pressure-sensitive input, multiple image and text layers, session recording and playback, the OpenRaster file format, an optional multi-session dedicated server, and a built-in chat, written in C++ with Qt 5.

References