Conceptual ideas

How can we use a multi-touch screen to control or make sound?

Since we haven't finished making the table, I made some examples in Processing using the mouse as input. The experience will change when you are able to use all your fingers to control the objects.

1. An object that appears at the point of your finger when you touch the screen; one for each finger. The objects could play a sound in a different way depending on their position on the screen, and you can move them around to change the sound. These objects could be found in a palette, making you able to choose different sounds. A tail could be nice.



2. The object you control is colliding with other objects on the screen, making different sounds.


3. Small, "raining" objects make sound when they hit the big objects. You can move the big objects around the screen.


4. Timeline moving across the screen. When the line goes over an object, it makes a sound. You can also move these objects outside the area where the line goes.


5. Rotating line: The timeline is rotating around a point. There could be more than one rotating line, and these lines could play the sound in different ways.

Making the thing

After some unsuccessful attemts and frustration we finally got the thing working!

To do this we had to get a 5mm thick sheet of acrylic and some IR LEDs. We also had to hack our webcam so that it would see the infrared light. We found out that it was efficient to have the fingers a bit wet.

In order to make the webcam able to register infrared light we had to remove a piece of glass from inside the camera. We tried two different types of IR-LEDs, and the difference between the small ones and the big ones was quite significant.