Slashdot Mirror
Air Guitar That Actually Plays!
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist has a nice feature of a real air guitar developed by a three students at the Helsinki University of Technology. In a nutshell it is a Linux PC with a sound card and webcam."
...on anyone who made a skin flute that actually works. At least no one from /.
Most excellent!
air guitar
The real story here is that they got a Webcam AND a sound card working under Linux...on the same box.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I believe I've seen a game for the eyetoy which does the same thing.
Next, an imaginary audience that actually applauds.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...I just built myself a theremin based partly on this. It transmits a pair of RF signals at around 1MHz. As you move your hand around it varies the inductance of the coils so that the coils transmit at slightly different frequencies. As a result you get a signal at the average of the two frequencies modulated by the beat frequency. Tune an AM receiver to the average frequency and you get to listen to just the beats. It took a couple of hours to build. (The project I linked to above has an AM receiver built into the circuit but I didn't bother with that as I already had a spare radio.)
Excellent! Finally we can get to cleaning up air polution with our air guitar playing, and usher in a new Utopia.
Party on Bill!
Party on Ted!
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
Why does strumming frantically produce hammer-ons? If im using hammer-ons and pull offs i have to strum less not more.
To be honest in the hands of novices you could just play a random pre-recorded solo and they probably wouldnt know the difference and in the hands of someone who can play....why???
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
I didn't think this story would be posted until there was a link with the story that had ads selling the product!
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
I for one welcome our air guitar playing overlords.......
How can it distinguish the different chords? TFA only mentions two orange blobs (the two hands), but they don't say anything about how to recognize when the different strings are pressed.
Face it, folks. Linux is a general purpose operating system on which you can do all of the expected things that one can do with such. We are WELL past the time where you can do basic things, like program and use webcams, on Linux, and nobody reading slashdot really needs to be fluffed further in this respect.
As far as this story goes, unless the inventors did something that could more or less only have been done on linux, then the linux aspect of this story is irrelevant.
This has already been done last year - at leat in a limited fashion - oin EyeToy Play 2 on the PS2.
"Virtual Air Guitar," eh? Now that's an unfortunate acronym if they ever try to market this...
when I play air guitar the traditional way it sounds good.
This new way might sound somewhat like how my actual guitar playing sounds: like crap.
More seriously, now that technology is this good, and we have things like this and the new Nintendo controller, maybe it's time for Nintendo (or someone else) to bring back the Power Glove for games and other computer stuff.
So when you buy the set, does it come with instruction on how to play "Smoke on the Water"?
Or does it just assume you are playing the F notes?
Clicked pie.
Ok, dont tell me, that dont even enter into the "Vaporware" category, is just thin air.
There are some games and sound software that do similar things on the Mac using the isight. I soon expect to see the user interface from Minority Report in operation on one of the more enlightened operations systems (read: non-microsoft).
Think Deeply.
does it play Ogg?
I have a pink oboe that plays quite well. Has some problems with the higher notes at times though.
...now all I need is an air mic for the shower and I can start my album
do.what.promptcmds
It doesn't. I tried it last summer in the science park, it's really just the two orange blobs. You can produce vaguely electric-guitar-like sounds but not play an actual song.
There's also drums with the same tech.
My niece also tested both; she abandoned the guitar pretty quickly and kept returning to the drums. I'll trust the judgement of a six-year-old on this one.
... even if they succeed completely with this project, they're all still just a bunch of wannabe's.
Your kidding right. this stuff is advertised on TV all the time. Punch the balloons as they fall. Beat up the bad guys as Batman. Nothing to see here at all.
Geeks, Drugs and ROCK 'N ROLL!
man, is that a load off!
Monstar L
As a musician and computer geek, I'm really fascinated by how they do this. There are so many nuances to guitar playing that it will be intriguing to see how they can pull this off.
:)
For example, does it analyze the angle/arc of the left hand to determine which strings are being stuck? That would suck to slightly arc your hand and suddenly you're playing the wrong string.
How does it determine where your left hand is in relation to the position of the neck? There are various neck sizes, after all.
The article implies that this is meant to simulate an electric guitar. With acoustic, you can strum on just about any position on the string and it will sound the same. With electric, the sound varies on the position due to the different pickups, each with its own tonal qualities, but each pickup is only an inch or so apart. Can this differentiate such minute details?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not looking at this as an "all or nothing" deal like a lot of people do on Slashdot. Oh, well, it can't do everything so it's teh suck! This is a very interesting start. I'm pondering more for what its potential could be more than what it can do right now. The whole cliché of taking baby steps first comes to mind.
Personally, I'd rather play the real thing. But at least this method could get people interested in guitar playing if they are too intimidated to buy a real one. And this won't result in painful calluses at the finger tips.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
thats it.. Clap
Don't hate me because i'm windows....
Now all I need is an amplifier that goes to 11, a couple of Disaster Area's speakers, and I can level my neighbour's house!
Every frustrated, talentless, guitarist-wanna-be can now boot up and fill the air with cacophonic emanations that sound nothing like their axe-grinding heroes.
Where do I get one?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Art's Theremin Page
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
If you can play it 'just like a guitar' - why not just buy a guitar?
Is there some weird aversion to strings that people have?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
If it happens to be a EMU10k# chip, you may be interested in kXproject.
...then again, this won't stop the usual trolls "Getting Quake 3 2 work iz 2 much hard in Leenuks" and "Installing ATI and nVidiot drivers requires some cryptic and l33t shell commands" (Yeah, like cliking on "Update" and the "Download drivers" in your centralised YaST-like administration tool ?)
Alternate Open-source project for EMU chips.
On the other hand if it's a ESS chip, you're out of luck unless you switch to FreeDOS (DOS PnP drivers are easy to find on internet) or Linux (OSS works out of the box, ALSA may need some tweaking if your chip uses unusual port numbers [like on my old deprecated laptop] and in all other case works perfectly).
---
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Now I won't just look stupid, I'll sound stupid too!
And, in a vague attempt to be on-topic, the idea is interesting, but I'll be more impressed once they can get it to work without the gloves. If nothing else, couldn't you see as a nice input method for translating ASL to glossed English? Sure, it will take a lot more work to get any kind of grammar working, but just being able to translate individual signs to the English equivalents would be of great value in emergency situations and hospitals.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Dear Bill & Ted,
The 80s called; they want you to come back.
- Rufus
I was going to try something like this with a webcam and Flash- the new Bitmap API lets you access raw pixel information, and getting information from a webcam is a snip with the new Video object. It'd be pretty processor intensive though, and i'd need a few samples to go with it too. Ho Hum. :o/
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Only in Finland...
Another one bites the dust
Might be useful here.
This is a fairly frivolous, fun development, and good luck to the researchers who developed it.
If I were them, I would be hawking this bigtime to the console manufactures as with a little more finesse this could easily blossom into something like Sony's EyeToy.
How about combining this with a Revolution controller so you can wave a conductor's baton to change the tempo of your buddy's air guitar grooving? I, for one, would welcome my new baton overlord.
This could actually change not just the way music is developed, but all of human-computer interaction.
Ramifications include:
It will be nice to be able to "type" by moving around the room (or even the back yard) instead of sitting at a desk and keyboard.
sigs, as if you care.
Versus.. you know. The real air guitar.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
And in tomorrow news :
Jean-Michel Jarre is claiming prior art...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Geez how freaking lazy are people? Playing a few chords or scales on a guitar is easy. Shredding like Steve Vai is hard. Being a guitar genius like hendrix is nearly impossible. How about people realize that something worth doing is worth doing right. Hell, even Bill and Ted eventually used their time machine to learn how to play :)
It strikes me that this thing represents a more abstract achievement which can be reapplied in very interesting ways with a little thought.
If it's accurate to any degree then this means that fairly minute body gestures can be interpreted and recorded digitally. So, you can:
1. Record body mechanics of top athletes and use the recordings to do diffs against people in training
2. Preserve a record of folk dances for dying cultures
3. Maintain a record of surgery performed. In a litigous society this would probably be very interesting
4. Add sign language to the babel fish
5. I dunno, use the middle finger to reboot your computer?
What else can you people come up with?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
The Minority Report
The Air Guitar Championship is a very real contest. This invention just cheapens the craft, the artistry, the beauty, of air guitar. Check out the video on that link, btw.
How can the second overall post be marked as "Redundant" but yet another similar reference much later be marked +5 Funny? Me thinks the moderators didn't get any last night (guess their hands had, uh, headaches).
in 1992 i saw a demonstration of air drums running on an amiga with a camera and a frame grabber...
as usual, it took a decade for peecees to match the fabulous amiga of lore
What ? Me, worry ?
Realistically, they *could* do it. Set a position for the strumming hand, press a pedal to set the position, set a position with the other hand for farthest fret, press a pedal to set the position, set a position for the innermost fret, press a pedal to set the position. Now the system has a way of determining the distance from the strumming hand and could simulate chords based on how far away the chord hand is from the strumming hand. For example, the farthest is C Maj, the next step in is D Maj, etc. and use the pedal for minor chords.
Again, it's just a thought and still very doable based on what they're doing. It would just take some intriguing algorithms and some steady hands during play (I'm talking about playing the air guitar, you perverts!) but it would make just about every primary chord accessible.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Air is suing for copyright infringement and defamation of character, how dare they. It seems they are finnished.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
However, instead of omitting the vocal track, the "karaoke" machine would omit the lead (or rhythm?) guitar track.
It might encourage the tone-deaf "singers" to try something else. If nothing else, the air-guitar antics would be more entertaining.
Just when you thought the air guitar world championships http://www.airguitarusa.com/home.html couldn't get any worse, now we're actually going to have to listen to these guys?
A-Bomb
> ...now all I need is an air mic for the shower and I can start my album
Just whatever you do, don't release a music video.
CowsAnonymous: We're here to help moo.
With that out of the way we can finaly create Cold Fusion
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
You can order some from here
Yeah, but more importantly, Does this run the Sony rootkit?!!!
that puts the webcab output of this thing onto the web so all your friends can see you acting like a total retard.
The waterproof version that works when I am rocking out in the shower and the mobile version for when I am stuck in traffic. ;-)
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
Yeah, but will it run Windows?
No-way Bill!! Yes-way Ted!!
I am. Lower your shields and power down your weapons, they are useless. Your biological and technological distinctivenes
Until I read "In a nutshell it is a Linux PC with a sound card and webcam."
Forget about music here.
Computer hand tracking is old technology, but using it to make a functional "air guitar" is neat. Check out this paper and this video for older work in this area.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
While people keep making references to Bill and Ted, let us not forget about the origin.
We can thank Joe Cocker who, back in the late 60s, gave us this wonderful instrument during one of his many drunken performances.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
"But at least this method could get people interested in guitar playing if they are too intimidated to buy a real one."
:)
If that happen, it would be very disappointing for the wannabe guitarist after buying a guitar... it's not as easy as it seems to extract cool sounds from the electric guitar.
Listening really gifted guitarists like Satriani can make a guy buy a guitar (like me)... not that. That seems just something for fun
My opinion as a guitarist that wannabe a better guitarist.
Can you hook it up to a Line6 PODxt Live?
I might finally be able to teach my wife how to play guitar..
Jimi Spier
www.jimispier.com - My tunes
....and you wanna talk about air guitar ?
How is this a major tech story IN ANY SHAPE OR FORM ?
"Today, it was announced that Barf Inc. invented a new way
to fold paper. Their patent covers the whole planet and of
course the moon and mars as the USA liberated these planets
from gravity which held sway over them for far too many
millions of years."
Aria Fletcher announced in a press conference:
'Yessir, weees is happy to blow those f*ckin PINKOS outta
the solaaaar systeeeem."
He promptly dropped dead.
Ummm, what's the average age of the Slashdot herd ?
12?
All white, uncoordinated males can be seen doing this while they dance (they usually alternate with air guitar). I actually tried to post this twice while listening to my favourite Heart tunes on the headphones, but I knocked things over trying to be Neal Peart in my mind and had to reset.
Maybe I'm Spinal Tap's next drummer!
as we cater further to our kids' laziness, they now won't even have to expend the energy to pick up a guitar make some virtual XBox controllers, and they'll pick up nothing at all for 95% of their waking life
My tech blog
EyeToy: Play2 for the Playstation has an air guitar game.
And a drum game, and a boxing game, and a bunch of others.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Guitar Freak and Guitar Hero with Eyetoy support.
But I like the Drumitar better.
Futureman and the Drumitar
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Look at the goofy face on that guy... you definitely need some facial recognition to cue sounds of hordes of screaming groupies, too.
Maybe add an automatic air-panty-launcher....
Is it just me or is all the "linux bias" way outdone by all the "they mentioned linux, it must be biased" (as if linux should be shunned and be the operating system that should not be named) or the "oh no, this is pro-linux slashdot is biased, slashdot only likes linux" and "wow, this is pro-microsoft, I can't believe I found it in slashdot because slashdot is so pro-linux" comments. The article isn't even about linux, linux is just the system the thing was made on. Would you rather them lie and say this was designed for Windows?
Imigine the number of new domains that would be unaccessable to most anglo users. cybersquating could reach a whole new level. If there's $$$ in it it's only a matter of time of course if the EU had a say in the net maby one day I could register the 'ü' in my name
Mirrordot video link
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
with the U-Force, didn't they?
The parent post is coming from a guy who has Judas Priest implied in his nickname, therefore being an appreciator of people who know the difference between strumming and a hammer on :)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
They used something unrelated, with the highly misleading name of Electrotheremin.
It's a fairly normal keyboard, with one extra feature. There is a ring below the keys that you can slide left or right with your finger. This let you drastically adjust the tuning. The keys are played normally, with the slide ring redefining the whole lot of them as desired.
As anyone can see, Ninjas + guitars are a very lethal combination.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm thinking how cool this would be at karaoke - and people do applaud for that! Virtual singers AND virtual players.. Neat!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Hopefully this will ultimately lead to something useful, like being able to translate sign language. Rather than a $20 Toys-r-us gimmick :o)
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I used to work for these guys. They've been doing this sort of thing since the late 80's, when they were one of the sensations of SIGGRAPH. (though their big musical thing was air drums rather than air guitar).
They first did it using an Amiga 1000 with a Live! board before switching over to DOS/Winblows in the 90's.
Has no one read the article? The system doesn't matter how your fingers look. It looks at the position of your hands and then makes up a lick depending on the minor pentatonic scale at that position on the neck. Since no one knows what this is, here's a link:
i ndex.php
http://www.cyberfret.com/scales/minor-pentatonic/
There are 5 scales, and they come one after the other as you move up the neck and then start at the begining again.
I doubt anybody actually wants to hear what most air guitar playing sounds like. They had better keep this thing away from karaoke machines. A deadly feedback loop might form between the two, resulting in music so bad that the waves might actually cause the planet to resonate and destroy all live as we know it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Why is this news exactly? I saw a demo of this exact same thing on the PS2 Eyetoy at Bestbuy about a month ago, I even played it.
A train station is where a train stops. A bus station is where a bus stops. On my desk I have a workstation...
... but is hard to master.
;-) /Tomas
I tried playing it at the Heureka science fair, and the difficult thing (as with most instruments) is to manage to play the right note by adjusting the distance between the hands appropriately. The right hand is easier and it is quite intuitive to strike the notes as with a real guitar. "Glissandos" (moving the left hand along the shaft while the strings are vibrating) also worked nicely.
This combined with continuous vocal pitch-correction would be a real hit in karaoke!
Not the air guitar, that is cool, what sucks is the fact that I submitted this yesterday and it was rejected. What kind of slashdot editting is this?
This looks like a lot of fun (both building it and playing it), but it's been done before.
I've had a go at one of these in the local mall and they are great input devices when calibrated correctly.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Has anyone played that PS2 game: RockStar? This air guitar immediately reminded me of the game. In the game version, you actually hold a small, toy guitar that has 5 colored buttons on the neck. The screen then scrolls toward you indicating when and which colored buttons to hit. You also "strum" the strings by flipping what looks like a fat light-switch thing on the guitar. There is also an awesome wammy-bar for those deep dives.
Then, in the background, you can see your selected guitar hero rocking out on stage. When you do good enough, you get a super-charger jolt from the guitar gods that signals you to physically "rock" the toy guitar into the upright position. Your guitar hero on-stage then spins the guitar and really jams out which makes the crowds go wild. Sounds childish and ego-centric? Yes. Easy? No. It's actually challenging and extremely addicting if you like playing guitar at all.
I'd like to see this new air guitar technology be integrated in some similar way like this PS2 game is.
Rock on!
Health Insurance Quotes
Now I can fulfill my destiny to become the next great rock star.
it really starts to rip if you drool
I find the use of an ordinary webcam quite interesting. Anybody know of similar projects where a webcam is used to track motion etc? Could this not be used for, e.g., very cheap virtual reality equipment?
If I only were a better programmer...
Nice to see our scientists and engineers devoting themselves to such worthy pursuits. So how is that cure for cancer coming?
couldn't sony have done this? With the eyetoy? Or is all you can do on the eyetoy is flail about.
Ska, punk-funk theramin? Yeah that's right, Fishbone's got it going on!
Huh? Oh yeah, that.
What will happen when computers start watching people. When this stuff becomes common place, everything is going to change--possibly as big a change as the web itself.
With a reasonable API for camera movement, some things that seem impossible will become trivial, and within a very short period of time you will have things like:
- Log of who entered your house and when that spans years, and what they used (drawers, couches) while they were there.
- Completely automated and safe cars that drive better than you ever could in any condition.
- Smart key locks that not only see your face or fingerprints, but watch your body as you walk up, looking for your face, your pattern of walking and possibly even hand or facial gestures.
- Never lose anything again, the computer could watch certain items in a room and tell you where that remote control or your cell phone is.
- Dancer-Musicians who create music through dance. Music that is actually good. (I'd like to see this done as an art project NOW. Just put some cameras outside a building and as people step into a circle drawn on the sidewalk, music plays based on their entire body position. See what people can create--imagine dance-dance revolution on steroids.)
- Entire entertainment walls that can be reconfigured with your hands while you sit on the couch--the entire wall being LCD panels, a camera can watch gestures and manipulate images....
- Data entry faster than a keyboard with no hardware.
- 4-d (moving) images of entire car trips (2 video cameras on a car, one pointing to the left, one to the right. Knit all the images together, use time/movement to act as separation.)
- The ability to have a complete, detailed 4-d model of anyone who had ever been in your house, (including movement).
- Unmanned gun defense with near-perfect accuracy. This could be so easy to put together that you could kill 20 armed soldiers with one gun and some good timing, or hold off an invasion with a few well-placed, camouflaged gun "mines".
The last point scares the crap out of me, but it's one of the easiest and most likely to become important. Picture it in Iraq: Deployment takes 5 minutes, you hide a video camera on either side of the street (for accurate 3-d calculations and improved target identification), and a single gun mounted somewhere, covered by a light layer of plaster or behind painted glass, perhaps. As soon as more than 20 soldiers enter the area, the automatic gun starts firing a couple rounds, spinning within a fraction of a second, and opening fire on another target. Within 10 seconds, 20 people are dead, and the terrorists are already setting up a similar installation in the next city. If you can't afford servos with that kind of speed, mount 3 or 4 guns for the same effect. Total cost, probably less than training one terrorist, certainly less than training a soldier.
The best part is calibration. With cameras, calibration is completely unnecessary. Simply give the system a general idea of where the cameras and guns are located and have the computer track the first shot fired. After calibrating on 1 or 2 shots, every single shot should hit it's target--without fail--with enough accuracy to hit vulnerable spots in armor.
This is so easy that governments will probably start deploying cheap, intelligent systems within a few years. I'm sure the only reason the US doesn't use this kind of system (if it doesn't) is because it so enjoys funding it's military contractors, and the big boondoggle projects achieve that goal so well.
This isn't stuff that's hard. All this stuff could be done today if "Hackers" had access to the right APIs--and the APIs should be there within the next couple years because of the research done by projects like this. Pretty cool over all.
and he used a theremin for a couple of songs during his concerts. Also used a laser harp, which needed special gloves for.
:)
Now what I'd do (in relation to the original article) is set it up as a air drum kit
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
If anyone actually read the New Scientist article, the current system consists of a video camera connected to a computer (I'm assuming a 30 fps video camera with 640x480xN colors, which is not cheap) and a pair of brightly colored gloves. The *next* version will be compatible with a normal webcam.
hey, speaking of your pre-recorded solo bits strung together....
(yes, the site is Flash, but it is also the only non-egregiously abusive use of Flash ever created. Enjoy!)
$
But just because you can do the finger mechanics doesn't mean you've got *musical* skillz - it just gives you more versatile ways to display your lack of talent, so the wrong notes you were trying to play at the wrong time are the ones you actually got.
But you can still have fun with it, and often, especially in folk music, the guitar is really there as a backup for your lousy singing voice and lame lyrics, so you don't have to be all that skilled to play backup. Woodie Guthrie once said that if you're using more than three chords in a song, you're just showing off anyway, but he was so good at writing the right lyrics for his audiences that he could get away with it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If anything, a more advanced version of this design could at least teach the mechanics of playing guitar. If you look at a lot of people who do air guitar, they don't have any real clue on the actual mechanics of playing. Just wiggle your fingers and miraculously the right note comes out. At least with something more advanced that teaches that the closer the fret, the higher the tone, you'd automatically be one step ahead of a lot of air guitarists, and that much closer to understanding the fundamentals when you have a real guitar in your hands.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
His name is Tom DeWitt; he's a video artist from New York. I saw the system -- which he called a Pantograph -- in operation a number of times. The person in front of the camera wore a few colored spots which the PDP-8 was able to (with some specialized hardware) determine their positions. This was decades before such systems were being routinely used for motion capture.
The system was crude by today's standards, but Tom was actually able to give a concert with an "air cello".
An account of that concert: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/tools/ ttool.php3?id=15
I can't wait to see this in competition:
c ontent/music/musicmidtown/airguitar.htmli rguitarjennifer.mov
0 2.html
3 7829.stm
http://www.ubersite.com.nyud.net:8090/m/61038
http://www.accessatlanta.com.nyud.net:8090/music/
http://originalalamo.com.nyud.net:8090/trailers/a
And for the public service portion of this post, I offerlinks to air guitar lessons:
http://www.mirrorimage.com.nyud.net:8090/air/page
Air Guitar PhD
http://news.bbc.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/1/hi/wales/47
Everything went fine until he dropped the PC on his foot while strumming it.
Also really plays:
i cs_airguitar.html
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~bret/create_electron
Air guitar that goes to Eleven.
The VPL DataGlove grew out of a glove interface created by Tom Zimmerman in the 1980's, hooked up to an Atari computer to allow him to "play" air-guitar. A few years later he and Jaron Lanier got together to advance the device to become what is known as the VPL DataGlove. A quick search of google will yield many links, here is a representative one.
The DataGlove (and similar input devices) helped to define the concept of what we know as "virtual reality" today, however, due to the patents on the device, we have not seen many glove implementations since then. Data gloves have remained a niche market - most methods of employing them have been explored (and further patented). Of these devices, we have seen simple contact sensor gloves, to the VPL-guided Mattel PowerGlove (for the Nintendo, but hacked to be used on other platforms as well, most notably the PC with Bernie Rohl and Dave Stampe's Rend386 and derivatives), and the Dextrous Handmaster (an articulated exo-skeleton that fitted around the hand and measured bend angles via hall-effect sensors - fairly accurate, but an absolute pain to put on and configure for each user), among others. The last of the consumer-grade gloves seem to be the P5 Virtual Controller. It seems to be based on similar technology as the Mattel PowerGlove. Same as the PowerGlove, it has been a failure in the marketplace (it can be picked up fairly cheap on Ebay and other places).
It is debatable while such input devices fail with the consumer, but I believe that part of reason can be traced to two factors: 3D position tracking and virtual display technology. The first factor can be explained by the fact that there are very few 3D position and orientation tracking technologies out there that combine speed and accuracy with quick setup, that are not encumbered in some way by patents. Magnetic tracking systems are out - even if they could work in a home environment (which is doubtful - they are difficult to get set up properly in a lab environment), both Polhemus and Ascension have such systems locked up tight in patents - if you want a magnetic tracker, you either attempt to build it yourself (I only know of one such attempt which was mostly successful), or you go to them and spend a lot of money (prices have come down, but you are still looking at over $2000.00 for a simple two sensor system). Many other companies have gone the route of inbound or outbound camera systems with IR markers (both passive and active). These can be a pain to set up and properly track, because unlike magnetic trackers, line-of-sight is a must. Thus multiple cameras and multiple IR markers must be used and tracked to maintain state. The P5 (and others) use a scaled down version of this system. The last method used is typically ultrasonic - which was used by the Mattel PowerGlove, as well as a 3D tracking system developed by Logitech. Such a system is also line-of-sight, but it also suffers from multi-path interference and absorption issues that introduce jitter and reduce accuracy.
Regardless of all of this, none of these systems really make sense when used to control the movement of an FPS or other avatar on a small two dimensional screen. All of these technolgies tend to be best used in an immersive environment, or in a CAVE-like setting. Unfortunately, both of these technologies - that of immersive HMDs or CAVE environments with shutter glasses - have been out of reach for most consumers, and they have their own issues which cause consumers to avo
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Forget the link, it seems mirrordot managed to fuck the file up (or /. just fried the server before it could get all of it). Just go to the project webpage and get it there :)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F