I forgot to post this last month, but I was over in Seattle and forgot about it when I got home. A few weeks ago I was featured Australia-wide on printed newspapers and on their subsequent online services with both a written and video interview.
You can check out the interview here.
If you haven’t heard of the latest motion capture device that’s been making waves in the community, let me break it to you. The Leap is an amazingly small device (literally smaller than a computer mouse) that can capture your hand’s input.
It’s been quoted to be 200 times more powerful “accurate” than the Kinect (whatever the term “powerful” “accurate” means is referring to), and from the videos on their website, it looks to pick up a very solid 3d image of whatever you put in front of it. Not to mention that it’s RRP at only $70.
Because it’s so small and works in such a small area, it’s much different than the Kinect, which is primarily aimed at tracking your whole body’s movements, which limits it’s uses somewhat.
I’ve managed to wrangle a dev release for this little motion capture beast. I’m receiving it in the next few weeks, so expect to seem some finger-music-making experiments from me shortly!
Since April 2011 I’ve been working solidly with the Microsoft Kinect, developing my software, Kinectar, to enable its use as a MIDI controller for performing music live. I’ve done a number of performances around Australia since I started the project, however, it’s safe to say that, although I would consider myself an electronic musician, I’m certainly no dancer. Enter, Paul…
Dancer, Paul Walker and I have joined forces to bring the Kinect controlled music concept into the world of contemporary dance. Recently we obtained a residency at PACT theatre (centre for emerging artists), where we spent the week developing different ways of implementing my Kinect music control system in a dance context.
My system is developed in Max and uses OpenNI drivers, OSCeleton and Ableton Live.
Chris Vik 