The Invisible Marching Band is a Kickstarter project from Parsons grad student Scott Peterman which consists of an open-source, Arduino-rigged glove which plays music corresponding to the hand motions of its wearer. Currently capable of playing the trumpet, trombone, tuba, snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals (sorry, no IRL air guitar yet), pantomiming trumpet motions and breathing causes the glove to emit trumpet sounds, air drum-playing correspond to the various drums, etc: Gizmag peeks under the hood and reports that “For the brass instruments, air pressure sensors are used for the mouthpiece so you are in effect blowing into your thumb to play. A rolling ball tilt switch sensor on the fingers measures the fingering action of playing the notes.”
This project is open-source, both as software and as hardware. The hope is to encourage others to experiment within this area of design: the creation of invisible interfaces that perfectly mimic their real world counterparts, and in so doing inspire a sense of play and enhance – rather than diminish – the creative experience.
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All six [instruments] mirror the functionality of their real world counterparts and can reproduce their full range of notes using MIDI data output from the gloves via USB. This allows them to be used with any audio editing software, from Garageband to Logic to Pro Tools.
Demo vid:
(Gizmag via Slashdot | Kickstarter page)
