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.
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.
Ok, dont tell me, that dont even enter into the "Vaporware" category, is just thin air.
...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.
Now I won't just look stupid, I'll sound stupid too!
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 ]
You just don't get it, do you?
Mirrordot video link
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F