Transforming Any Flat Surface Into a Control Panel With Sound

New submitter brunozamborlin writes "I just published a short video that shows how a very cheap contact microphone can be used to recognize different types of fingers touch and transform any surface into an interactive board. In the video we put the microphone over different surfaces such as kitchen tables and balloons and through realtime gesture recognition we show how we can play different virtual music instruments using a technique called physical modeling . A mobile version would be definitely possible." The project's Web page shows several more examples. Update: 12/31 15:17 GMT by T : Bruno Zamborlin points out that the surfaces don't need to be flat; instead, they simply need to be rigid.

Training?

[Mabbo]

Do you have to give the system training for the specific purpose and gesture? And could the microphone be on the opposite side of the surface? If so, I think I've got an awesome new way to unlock my door.

Re:Flawed, or useable?

[Andy_R]

It depends what you want to use it for - as a replacement for a touch screen, it's probably not very useful because location information isn't going to be as easy to capture as timbral information, but as a musical instrument (or as a way of adding more sensitivity to existing electronic instruments, it's amazing.

I wonder if accurate position information could be captured by triangulating with 3 of these contact mics?

Re:Huh?

[brunozamborlin]

In the video we see that different gestures are mapped to different sounds. For example the coin enables a certain abstract sound whist the bare fingers enables the bass sound and the nails enables the pad... this is done thanks to gesture recognition techniques (a modified version of Hidden Markov Models to work in realtime). Apologies whether it is not clear enough in the video though...