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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."
...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.)
You know, I have no problem understanding the humor in it, but actually I usually have more trouble getting soundcards working under Windows than under Linux, because the soundchips have such obscure naming, and if you don't have the box it can be pretty tedious. /proc/pci" find the soundchip name, and chose it from the kernel compiler, and you're there. It may not be (your definition of) easy to get the system running, but atleast i don't have to check out lousy unorganized driverpages, and yes, creatives is probably the worst of them.
Under Linux, well if you're using a non-compile distro, it usually just works, if you're using gentoo or the like, "cat
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.
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
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).
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"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Only in Finland...
Another one bites the dust
And in tomorrow news :
Jean-Michel Jarre is claiming prior art...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
"Next, an imaginary audience that actually applauds."
You know, this shouldn't be too hard to do. You could to write some software to simulate different types of concert crowds, at different levels of enthusiasm.
You could, for instance, have it react to the signal from your electric guitar or microphone to fill in the quite moments of your jam session. You could also it produce a roar of recognition from a virtual crowd for whatever piece of shit you start practicing on your favorite instrument. Whenever you're finished, lots of more applause!!
Something like this could be really, really funny! Your own little automatic, Hollywood applause machine. Hey, you could have it do laugh-tracks too, although this would be more difficult to trigger automatically.
I did the same thing 6 years ago, with a web cam on a windows 98 box, using Visual C++. So maybe you could say that Linux caught up with 6 year old windows technology, just kidding, although I'm sure I'll get plenty of anti-Microsoft snaps. I've also done many another web cam projects, center a web cam on a moving target, point a web cam at a speaking target, point a laser pointer at a moving target, recognive text on a white board as people write making a virtual white board. All in all this sort of thing isn't that hard or complicated.
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!
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