Huedoku: Color Puzzle App born in the Jungle

    HUELO, HI, January 23, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Artist Gabriel Mott, from Maui, Hawaii, and App developer, Dave Scruton, from the Big Island, have submitted Huedoku to the App Store and it will be available for download in days. The revolutionary, therapeutic color puzzle app is an exciting new game that offers color mastery for the masses. Conceived in January of 2014, Huedoku, was coded in the jungles of Hawaii, over 100 miles away from the nearest technology hub of Honolulu. Huedoku will be available for iPhones and iPads with the version for Android to follow close behind.

Bridging art and science, the solution of a Huedoku puzzle is found by moving color tiles into harmonic order. It's like placing giant pixels with your finger until glowing color interaction is restored..

Mott, who left a VP position with a public technology research company in Silicon Valley ten years ago, is the inventor and designer of Huedoku, and lives in Haiku, Maui, overlooking the famous surf location "Jaws". His internet access is over a cell phone connection because no telephone or cable lines reach his studio home where he works.

"We've certainly faced some challenges being far away from any tech hub," says Mott, "However, in many ways, it's worked to our advantage. I can see Haleakala from my window and hike to the ocean in 20 minutes without passing a single home. The essence of Huedoku is color relationship and what better place to absorb visual harmony than surrounded by the gorgeous colors of Maui?"

Mott's business partner Dave Scruton, lives about an hour by bus from the Hilo airport on the Big Island. The two met at the Interactive Arts Festival, SOURCE, on Maui about 5 years ago. Scruton told Mott that if he ever had an idea for an app, he could "code anything".

In the past year, the two have only been in the same location twice. The first was at TEDxMaui who offered huedoku a presence at their annual event in September of 2014. The response was tremendous, eliciting from attendee Barry Rivers, Founder/Director of the Maui Film Festival to say:

"huedoku will change the way you see both color and the world"

Being located on Maui also puts Mott in close vicinity to his teacher, Dick Nelson, Maui's resident color master with whom many of the brightest local artists have studied. Nelson studied with Josef Albers at Yale in the 1950's, an artist and teacher who came out of the "Bauhaus" movement in Germany, and is often considered the greatest colorist of the 20th century. The color matrix on which Huedoku is based was developed by Nelson who has furthered many of Albers' famous color lessons.

Mott and Scruton have collaborated from their respective homes in the jungle for the last year over Skype and telephone to create Huedoku. The app currently has over 75 testers, most of them located on Maui. The vast majority have never tested an app before.

"The side benefit of having all these local testers is that Huedoku has generated an almost cult following," says Mott.

Recently, about 800 people gathered for the Huedoku Olympics at the Maui Tropical Plantation. Two players were given a platform to challenge each other on a beta version of the App, playing the same puzzle, while facing the audience. Two massive screens behind each player showed each move as it played out. The crowd was raucous.

"It was huedork-tastically awesome. People were screaming with excitement as I finished out one of the most challenging puzzles in 2 minutes and 33 seconds," explains Ben Holt, the current Huedoku champion and founder of the SOURCE Maui arts festival.

Huedoku is similar to a jigsaw puzzle, yet the solution can be discovered intuitively by looking for colors that "just look right when they fit". When everything is in its natural place, "it glows as the color relationship is based on timeless elements of visual perception and color theory similar to that leveraged by the Impressionist art movement of the late 1800s," says Mott.

Scruton and Mott, the creators of Huedoku, have developed relationships with artists, educators, neuroscientists, and color vision experts around the world. Mott believes, however, that the app will be successful because of a grass roots local following.

"It's about having fun," says Mott. "We've had a groundswell of support from mainland friends but especially in our Maui community. People have gone absolutely nuts over Huedoku."

Bio:
Mott, a former Vice President with Jupiter Media Metrix in San Francisco, is the inventor of Huedoku and creator of the Colorbox, an interactive art piece exhibited on the Big Island and multiple time at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center. He has been immersed in color education and research for the last ten years and is the author of websites showing color relationship that have had over one million visits.

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