Week 11 - Sketch 3

This week, I mainly worked on the research with Kay. We gathered a ton of resources and I went through each one thoroughly, looking and noting down projects, theories and so forth that were related to our project.

The concept of Air Guitar has been approached many different ways and actually exists in the world. It wasn't too hard for us to find products and projects that could be related to ours.

Jinsil sent me a research project of Csiro's Air Guitar project. They embed sensors into a t-shirt so that it can be played like a real guitar. Movements by the wearer's arms are mapped and beamed wirelessly to a computer which interprest them and turns them into musical notes.




Another project I researched was Takara Tomy's Air Guitar which uses an infrared string system to detect your strums and a variety of buttons both on the fret boards and above it to produce a wide variety of music notes.



There are a lot of good projects and products we can relate our project to, so this is great because we can refer to how these products are done and further push our project.

I also started working on our final presentation this week. I started to gather all information into a word document and layed them out on a slide and started designing what information should be on the slide and what to talk about in terms of our presentation. Kay and I have finished most of the research at this point.

We did meet up this week to go over the patch for the programming that Drew put together. We gave input on the outcome and what we can change and add. We also talked about the next few weeks and what we would be doing and sharing the workload. We will be meeting up next week again to finalize tasks for everyone. Next week we will be discussing when our documentation video should be done and what we want to do in terms of our essay.

Busy weeks ahead of us!

Week 10 - Sketch 3

This week, we got into our groups (Drew, Kath, Nabil, Kay and me) and discussed some ideas for Sketch 3.

Over the week, we brainstormed and thought about quite a few ideas, but none that stood out or was feasible in the time we were given.

A few ideas were:

1. Interactive Lamp
2. Interactive Heart Rate Monitor where a heart shaped led would blink and tell you the rate your heart is going.
3. An environmental interface where people can interactive with. There is a physical object aspect and a spacial environment aspect where the participant triggers the things on the screen and guides it towards the 3D object.

We discussed a lot of these ideas in class with Jinsil and Greg. However, as we continued to brainstorm, we reached a decision and gave them a finalized idea of an Air Guitar.

The invisible guitar is an abstracted version of a guitar. The user will put on gloves with various sensors embedded in them and be able to play as if they are holding a real guitar. The user will be able to select a combination of three notes multiplied by a frequency. They then will be able to choose a volume to play at. The notes are selected through the bending of the index, middle and ring ngers on the left hand. The pitch of the notes will be based on how far out they hold their left hand and the volume will be controlled by how fast the user strums their right hand. The sensors needed will be 3 bend sensors, a proximity sensor and an accelerometer. The gloves will then be plugged into an arduino board which leads to Max/MSP where the sounds are generated and played. Through the invisible guitar the user will be able to generate their own sounds and songs with relative ease.

We have created a final project plan that can be found here:
http://www.sfu.ca/~ach3/finalprojectplan.pdf