Handwavy has introduced AirBeats – a virtual drum machine made for the upcoming Leap Motion controller. AirBeats is among the first music apps for the upcoming $80 Leap Motion controller, which is expected to ship July 22nd.
Features:
- Naturally ‘air drum’ your beats
- Play with your bare hands or use pencils, chop sticks, or drum sticks
- Select among 12 different drum kits in the styles of Acoustic, Hip Hop, Dubstep, Trance, Dub, Drum ‘n’ Bass, and Techno
- Save and recall your own patterns
- Export your patterns for use in other audio applications
- Play through any available audio device on your system
The Leap Motion is a USB sensor that promises to be cheaper and much more accurate than previous gestural controllers. It creates a three-dimensional interaction space of 4 cubic feet to control a computer more precisely and quickly than a mouse or touchscreen, and as reliably as a keyboard.
The Leap is accurate to within 1/100 of a millimeter, a precision level required for touch-free natural gesture controls like pinch-to-zoom. It is also the first product in history to accurately sense the individual movements of all 10 of the user’s fingers
AirBeats will be available on Airspace on July 22, 2013. For more information, see the Handwavy site.
via Adam Somers
I am buying this the minute it comes out..
The Leap Motion is going to be a big deal – but I’m more interested in seeing other types of applications for it.
How about a theremin that is accurate and consistent? How about three dimensional MIDI controllers?
You’d need two Leap controllers to accurately reproduce the Theremin, as there is one antenna to control the pitch and another antenna to control the volume kinda like a manual ADSR. It could be done with only one Leap, but it would be harder to control both the note and the volume with the same hand.
I’m faily sure we’ll see that pop up eventually 🙂
The Motion sense position in three dimensions, so you could map it to track left to right as pitch, up and down as volume and front and back to something like filter cutoff. So you could do polyphonic theremin using two hands!
If you’re not a controllerist super-baller, though, you could just use both hands with one Motion. The Motion can track up to 10 points.
AirBeats looks like a really nice application, can’t wait to get my hands on (or rather above it)!
Just to respond to the request for a general purpose Leap MIDI application, this is exactly what my application Geco does. More information in this Synthtopia post from April: https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2013/04/12/gesturecontrol-for-leap/
Air guitar just got real !