I was pleased and flattered that the Stribe receceived TWO "Editor's Choice" blue ribbons this weekend at Maker Faire Austin 2008. Thanks guys! It's a wonderful feeling to be recognized for all the long nights of hard work.
I made some terrific new friends and got to talk "geek" non-stop for 2 days!
And of course it's always a distinct pleasure watching people discover the Stribe!
Last year I went to the Faire in Austin with the original Stribe prototype under my arm and just wandered around, showing it to a couple folks. Then a few months ago I had my first booth at the San Mateo Faire - which was incredible. I plan to bring a bit less stuff, and the booth won't be quite as "fancy" this time.
I'm psyched to meet up with Scott Driscoll from Curious Inventor (http://www.curiousinventor.com), David Fowler from ucHobby (http://www.uchobby.com), and several others for a weekend of gettin' our geek on, and BBQ.
Scott and I have designed a new product, called "Stribe1", which is a single-strip stribe module - one touchstrip and 2 columns of LEDs. Soon we'll be selling these on his curiousinventor.com site, along with a variety of touchstrips from SpectraSymbol. There will be an official announcement and lots of pics and demos soon. Can't wait to see what people make with 'em!
Got my cowboy hat on and I'm mostly packed... I'll try to post some pics as the weekend progresses.
The above demo shows 1/2 of the ingredients of a "true" multi-touch display.
To make images appear under your fingers instead of over on the computer's screen, takes only a few more steps:
1) Remove the IR filter from the camera so it can detect infrared, then add a filter over the lens to ignore visible light, so the camera only "sees" IR.
2) Add an IR source inside the box, pointing up (many commercially available security cameras already come configured with IR "blast" arrays, or they can be purchased as a separate unit, or make your own).
3) Exchange the tracing paper for a material that is still translucent yet allows IR light thru.
4) Add a little LCD projector next to the camera in the box, also pointed up.
TaDa!
Now your hands will be bathed in invisible infrared light. As your fingers approach and/or touch the surface, the camera "sees" IR blobs, which are then processed in software to differentiate touch and other gestures. The "Touchlib" library includes everything you need to process the images (as seen in the video). Now you project the image up onto the touch surface from below. The image is projected in the visible spectrum and so doesn't interfere with the IR blobs being received by the camera.
There is also a way to get crisper IR blobs, without bathing the user's hands in IR, by using a technology called "Frustrated Total Internal Refraction" (FTIR), popularized by Jeff Han. FTIR relies on the unique properties of acrylic sheet, e.g. it is extremely reflective on the inside surface, until touched (or until it gets dirty). By shooting IR into the edges of the sheet, touches are "seen" by the IR camera whenever the internal refractive properties of the acrylic are "frustrated" by being touched. Each touch bounces a blob of IR down into the camera.
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I've been having some great conversations about multi-touch lately. What constitutes multi-touch? Does dual-touch count? Can multi-touch be "faked" on a single-touch surface using close timing of events (e.g. milliseconds apart)? What if you use the same approach on a dual-touch surface? Is this how the iPhone works (e.g. software detection of finger-spacing)? What about the Macbook's dual-touch mousepad? How does that work, anyways? Which technologies are dominating, if any? Capacitive, grid o' wires, heat sensing, IR bath? Which approach is typically used for which commercial application?
A little demo of 'scalar', triggered by a stribe. Scalar is written by vlad spears, of 'balron' fame. By changing simple things like the sensor poll rate, sticky or non-sticky values, MIDI scale, and instrument mappings, I am able to play the stribe in a variety of modes.
Of course the stribe strips can trigger a much higher resolution map than this (1024 potential points of resolution per strip). Though it doesn't demonstrate this unique aspect of the stribe, it's still fun to play with. The strips are much more sensitive than buttons, requiring the lightest touch. Rolling a finger on it's "ball" can produce a variety of subtle effects, a slide from one note to the next, or produce a very rapid 'fingered' pattern.
LED feedback is minimal at this point. Still working on the firmware...
Tenebre - Platinum Standard Interesting lo-fi-ish production and good playing on this instrumental track. The sound is stylistically reminiscent of Pavement, Sebadoh, and Slint, with a little dose of Elephant Six thrown in, and at the end some bells. More bells!
Giant Alphanumeric Nixie Tube available for lots of $ on the 'bay
Sometimes I go to this page and just listen to the default sounds
A couple of 3-dimensional alphabets. Info on the above alphabet. The image below I came across randomly and I can't find any information about it, so let me know.
"As the conductive stretchable fabric... is displaced towards the bowl it shorts out different lengths of ...conductive plastic... The result is a circular array of nearly mass-less displacement sensors. The gesture-to-displacement relationship changes according to distance from the center of the bowl..." read more
Original "Daisy" Song 1961 Max Mathews, John Kelly, and Carol Lochbaum
From a Wikipedia article on Max Matthews: "In 1961, Mathews arranged the well-known song Daisy Bell ("Daisy, daisy") for an uncanny performance by computer-synthesized human voice, using technology developed by John Kelly of Bell Laboratories and others. Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of this remarkable speech synthesis demonstration and was so impressed that he used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as astronaut Dave Bowman disables his cognitive functions."
So far this is the best Maker Faire 2008 summary I've seen - it captures the diversity of projects and amazing stuff quite well. Note however that even this great vid represents barely 1/10 of the actual amazingness to be found at this huge Faire.
Oh, and look for a brief shot of The Stribe at about 7:34. :)
Yesterday was the debut of the Stribe at Maker Faire, and it was amazing! A non-stop procession of fascinated people surrounded the booth for 10 straight hours. Stribe pioneer Vlad Spears totally saved the day when my MOTU interface gave up the ghost 2 hours into the demo. Just when I thought all was lost, Vlad stepped into the breach, fired up his own machine and held the crowd mesmerized with his lovely new Max 5 app, "Scalar", which made the Stribe into a wonderfully easy-to-play instrument. He manned the booth heroically and provided detailed explanations of the stribe, the monome, Max, and how it all fits together. I don't think he drank, ate, or sat down the whole time. My own demos pretty much relied on the MOTU, so without Scalar and Vlad it's hard to say what the day would have been like.
Thank You Vlad! You are a true rockstar, in every sense of the word.
I'm still a bit stunned at the level of interest and the many wonderful conversations I had with visitors and fellow Makers.
Today I hope to borrow an audio/MIDI interface from a fellow Maker and run some of my original demos, including a cool demo app written by stretta, along with a couple of my own creations.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth on Day 1. I apologize if I didn't get to chat or you caught me in a flustered moment, but the onslaught of Make fans was unrelenting (which is really great) and I was overwhelmed at times. It was cool to meet members of the Stribe community in person, and I came away feeling both grateful and proud and just plain tickled. Something tells me this is going to be quite a ride. Thanks SO much for the enthusiasm and encouragement so far - it really does keep me going.
I have some great pictures and I'll post them as soon as I can. :)
Now it's time to get ready for Maker Faire, Day 2!
From tk of midibox.org: "...Most of you guys are using Arduino based hardware, therefore I'm not sure if you are interested in an alternative approach, which is based on the MIDIbox hardware platform and MIOS. As the name implies, the focus is on MIDI communication instead of OSC via USB, accordingly this solution covers different usecases.
"The main difference to your current approach is the autarkic firmware, which doesn't require a computer to process the sensors, handle the LEDs, and to communicate with other MIDI devices. This might make it less flexible for experimental stuff, on the other hand I can easily add a LCD, buttons, more LEDs, rotary encoders, etc... - everything which is provided by MIOS - and control my MIDI synths directly..."
