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Guitar Hero, On a Real Guitar, To Hit Shelves In 2009
An anonymous reader writes "The Minneapolis Star Tribune features an article (with photos) about a prototype electric guitar that doubles as a Guitar Hero controller. It is not just another guitar-shaped controller with buttons: it is an actual, playable guitar, shown in-action. The startup company, Zivix, LLC, intends to bring the product to store shelves in 2009. Web searches indicate that the company may have raised around $800K for the venture. The company is also working on technology that enables finger sensing on a real guitar that would allow your computer to teach you how to play chords or evolve into a future guitar synthesizer."
I work at Zivix. The comments here (both positive and negative) are helpful for us to figure out hw best to explain what we've developed. Here's a few points: - Our core technology is proximity-based fingertip sensors that can be installed in a fretboard. The Headliner just has 12 on the first string, but other models can populate up to a full guitar - The challenge with Guitar Rising and other methods that work with a normal guitar is to analyze the signal, possible with one string, really really difficult with more than 1 string at the same time, which is why Midi guitars have separate pickups. Delay is a big issue, since analysis is always done after the fact - Guitars only allow 1 note per string. Playing the game across more than 1 string would be pretty hard, our guitar allows "chords" on one string, just like the plastic controller - On the Headliner, you don't really learn to play guitar, but you do learn to fret and pick a string, and end up with a real guitar when the game is over. Bundled software will let you trigger loop combinations interactively to play on top of, makes practicing a lot more fun. - On our other products coming out, you can learn to chord, and view the result on the screen, chords can be seen before picking a note, so delays are minimal - hope this helps....