Okay, so maybe this Air Guitar doesn’t make all of your teenage dreams a reality. However, it’s high time that someone developed a concept that gets rid of controllers almost all together. That someone is Chris O’Shea who has created a feasible Air Guitar Controller for the Kinect.
The Microsoft Kinect System was a logical starting point for this air-guitar controller, which dispenses with traditional controllers (even the cool guitar controllers that come with Rock Band). It’s pretty much a “hand’s free” controller, but in a slightly different way.
If you’re like me you probably spent countless hours rocking out and playing air guitar in your bedroom in front of the mirror. Or, maybe you are an occasional air-guitarist, that only plays when the mood strikes. Regardless, this thing is pretty darned cool.
At present this Air Guitar is only a prototype, but I would expect to see more and more of this type of controller in the near future. It’s almost as cool as the Iron Man computer that Tony Stark uses. Well, almost. The Kinect partners up with C++m open Frameworks and openCV to make this thing work. Granted there are also some other fancy drivers that allow the system to detect your rock-ability via cameras and such like.
The system is designed to detect the player (aka “guitarist”) and the location of his or her hands. Granted this means that we’ll all have to work on our guitar-playing form.
From the demo video it appears that you are shown a guitar-like shape that helps you arrange yourself for proper guitar playing. I imagine that the location of either hand and the differences of height and style of different air-guitarists might provide a challenge for the software, but once the kinks are worked out I’m convinced that this is going to be pretty rock-tastic.
If you’re interested in other things Kinect related, you should definitely check out this Kinect Piano Keyboard (a la the movie “Big” with Tom Hanks), that we reviewed a while back. Probably just as cool and just as promising is the Super Mario Brothers Kinect Hack that we took a look at recently.
Via: Gadget Venue
