Imagine being able to reach out and tweak virtual strings with your hands to create massive waves of light and sound. Last year, my colleague Alejandro Franco and I brought that idea into reality at Mexico City’s Digital Cultural Center with Resortes – an interactive installation manipulated in real-time through the hand gestures of participants.
// Developer Labs
New projects and features, insights on the future of human-computer interaction, and updates on Leap Motion developer communities around the world.
Robot building, drone hacking, hardware workshops – RobotsConf is a place where hardware and software collide and everything weird, cool, and wonderful about the Maker movement comes to life. Naturally, we had to be there. We travelled to see what people were building at one of the country’s largest robo-gatherings. We saw a wide range […]
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, […]
I’m Isaac, and I’m an experience engineer at Leap Motion. I work exploring a newly discovered relationship with our hands. I’m intensely interested in communing with digital nature, and the tools that I use are Three.js, Web Audio API, and most of all, Leap Motion. Most of what I have done can be found at cabbibo.com where I have been working on constructing my own personal Ice Kingdom.
This week, we’ve explored the creative process that went into building my Leap Motion guitar app, along with some thoughts about mapping and visual feedback. My app was built quickly as a proof of concept, making use of several existing free frameworks, and could certainly be improved. In the last of my guitar app series, we’ll take a look at how I brought these frameworks together, along with one final variation – a theremin-like synthesizer.
The toughest part of my Leap Motion guitar project was the nature of the mapping – deciding what does what. To get started, I decided to approach the problem from a design perspective. As in any design task, there are many correct answers, and yet also a lot more wrong answers lurking in the deep. […]
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. In this three-part series, I’d like to talk about the amazing possibilities of using the Leap Motion Controller for musical expression, and show how musicians can add new dimensions to their sound.
What does music look like? What happens when you reach into a fractal? Explore these questions on Developer Labs with Isaac Cohen, and stay tuned for his livestreamed SFHTML5 talk on Thursday. Plus, a great guide to waving through colors with a Philips Hue bulb. Also this week, we have a real-time projection mapping robot, […]
Drawing his inspiration from music, mathematics, and the infinite possibilities of space and nature, Leap Motion experience engineer Isaac Cohen likes to push the limits of the web. At last October’s HTML5 DevConf, Isaac showed how we can rethink web design beyond current interfaces and reimagine what the Internet might look like in the future.
What do a Philips Hue bulb and the Leap Motion Controller have to do with each other? Nothing, until you start imagining how they can work together. Today, we’ll take a look at how I can control colors by waving my hand in the air.