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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...now all I need is an air mic for the shower and I can start my album
do.what.promptcmds
... even if they succeed completely with this project, they're all still just a bunch of wannabe's.
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 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!
Only in Finland...
Another one bites the dust
Might be useful here.
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 ]
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.
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 ?
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?
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.
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?
Mirrordot video link
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.
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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