Want to tweak, distort, and transform your sound with Leap Motion and electric guitar? This week on Developer Labs, Nicolás Earnshaw talks about designing musical interfaces and his experiments with a touchless modulating app that uses the Leap Motion Controller to track a guitar head. Plus, check out Isaac Cohen’s latest talk on art, nature, WebGL, and coffee.
Also new this week, how to control a 3D printer with hand gestures, an experimental WordPress plugin that you can try right now, updates to OpenLeapKit, and muting unwanted phone calls with a wave of your hand. To subscribe to our developer newsletter and get updates through email, click here.
Featured News
Community Upgrade
We recently upgraded our community forums with a clean new look and streamlined sign-in – so that if you’re logged into the Airspace Store, you’re automatically logged into the forums. We’ve also added an overall categories drop-down to the main to make it easier for you to explore your favorite topics.
Developer Labs
Leap Motion and Electric Guitar
There’s a space between an electronic musical instrument and the sound it creates where almost anything is possible. With the right technologies, you can tweak, distort, and transform your performative input to create whole new soundscapes on the other side. Here’s the story and design process behind Nicolás Earnshaw’s experimental guitar distortion app.
Part 1: Building Bridges: Exploring the Musical Interface Gap
Part 2: Twice Invisible: How to Design a Natural Music Interface
Part 3: Under the Hood of a Touchless Modulating App for Guitar
Math, Nature, and Thievery: Isaac Cohen at SFHTML5
How can our digital creations steal from the natural world around us? And what’s so great about coffee? Discover the answers to these (and many other) questions with Isaac Cohen’s recent talk at SFHTML5. Watch the video or check out a full transcript on Developer Labs.
On Developer Labs, you can find deep insights and technical perspectives on Leap Motion projects, natural user interfaces, and developer communities worldwide. Want to contribute a guest post? Submit your proposal.
Community Toolkit
Swipe through posts in WordPress (and Developer Labs). pattyland created an experimental plugin that lets your site visitors easily browse posts and pages. For the next 24 hours, you can try it out on Developer Labs – just swipe left or right to explore the best that our developer community has to offer.
Controlling a 3D printer with hand gestures. Andrew Maxwell-Parish posted a full guide to setting up a motion-controlled 3D printer using Arduino, Processing, and G-code on Instructables. Check out the setup in action below:
OpenLeapKit update. tylerz’s collaborative toolkit for the Leap Motion Controller now includes multi-hand interaction with circular menus and fist and open hand support. You can also add language support and build on it.
In his latest round of Leap Motion hardware integration experiments, Patrick Catanzariti created demos for muting a phone call on Android and playing music with an Arduino MIDI Shield. The code is now available on GitHub.
To see the latest UI elements and sample code shared by the community, check out Links & Libraries. You can share your code in the dev category on our community forums.
Highlights & Innovations
Whether you’re a veteran or a noob, you can often find answers to important questions on the community forums. This week – how can I create a Leap Motion-enabled web cursor?
Flow Studios is calling for developer feedback on their latest game, Orc’s Arena, free for Mac and Windows in the Airspace Store. A fresh take on the hack and slash genre, it features gestural spell-casting and swordfights.
